


Divine Patronage

by STMPD



Category: Ranma 1/2, ああっ女神さまっ | Ah! Megami-sama! | Oh My Goddess!
Genre: 90's anime, Humor, Magical Girls, Martial Arts Sex Comedy, Norse Mythology - Freeform, Technobabble, and sexy, but evil, drunken debauchery, supernatural bureaucracy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:08:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28685370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/STMPD/pseuds/STMPD
Summary: The year is 1996, a few years after Belldandy and Keichii's marriage - and six months after Ranma's disastrous wedding attempt with Akane.Urd, Norn of the Past, is depressed. She's blown most of her good will with the Aesir on drinking binges after watching her sister find true love - leaving her in the dust. Skuld digs up a contract from a few years back and tries to find her work - all she needs is a good job to forget her love troubles, right? Wrong.Ranma is wallowing in their own self-loathing when a hot woman in a pink Cadillac bursts out of the Tendo's TV and drags (kidnaps) him to a seedy bar to discuss the terms of a contract his father hooked him into eight years ago that he doesn't even remember. All he has to do is go do little jobs for his new patron goddess as a hero (in the Greek sense) and she'll help him put his life back together, right? Wrong.From the demented mind of STMPD, professional fanfiction hack, comes a new martial-arts-sex-comedy yarn that will hopefully actually get updated more than once a year, a tale of drunken goddesses, broken dreams, strange quests, and two people's respective quests to find meaning in their lives - no matter the cost.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 19





	1. In which a Goddess enters a Hero’s life in simultaneously the best and worst way possible

**Author's Note:**

> Okay okay okay! Gather round, you gormless weeaboos! It's time for the GENERIC FANFICTION COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER!
> 
> SEE! Ranma 1/2 is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and Shogakukan Publishing!
> 
> THRILL! Ah My Goddess is copyright of Kosuke Fujishima and Kodansha Publishing!
> 
> SHOCK! AC/DC owns the song 'TNT'!
> 
> WOW! Obviously my gaijin ass is involved with None of those companies, but under the vagaries of Fair Use I can totally tell stories about these characters as long as I don't make any money off of it, or as long as neither of them try to sue me! Don't know why they would, but it never hurts to cover your ass in these cases!
> 
> THAT'S RIGHT! For twelve LOW LOW LOW MONTHLY Payments of $59.99, get the GENERIC FANFICTION COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER for a GREAT DEAL! BUY ONE GET ONE FREE! THE MORE YOU SPEND THE MORE YOU SAVE! Fall behind on your payments and I'll send my COUSIN GUIDO to BUST YOUR KNEECAPS-
> 
> Whew. Okay. I'm done. Roll the projector, folks. It's fanfic time.

**Summer 1996**

**Northwest Tokyo**

It had been a long and miserable day at the Tendo Dojo. This, at least in the mind of Saotome Ranma, was evidenced by the fact that _he_ was currently a _she_ , the unfortunate side effect of the ancient Chinese curse she still hadn’t managed to dispel after three years of living with it.

It was her - his - whatever - birthday. No one in the Tendo dojo had remembered except Akane. She had offered to bake a cake. He had told her to just go to the store and buy one. She had piledriven him into the koi pond. Things went downhill from there. Hours had dragged on and nothing had happened except the usual shit - Shampoo still thought crushing his ribcage in a submission hold was a good way to get a date, Ryoga showed up and misinterpreted the whole thing courtesy of some new martial arts technique, Ukyo had offered to pay off his tab if she got to go on a birthday date with him, Kodachi had tried to use her female form as crocodile chow. Things had happened, but nothing had changed. Oh, except she was currently female. Everyone else had gone to bed, but she’d stayed up, listening to the chirp of crickets and wondering why she bothered.

With what? Well. With anything.

Ranma thought. Went over to the stove, turned on the heat, put a tea kettle on. Then she went over to the kotatsu and turned on the TV. If nothing else, watching Takeshi Kitano reruns could probably cheer her up, right?

Maybe? Probably not? There was no way around it: Ranma Saotome was a loser, boy or girl.

She didn’t even notice the channel change, the screen flickering, winking out, and then cutting to a long, long highway somewhere in some desert. She listened for the sound of water boiling-

And then she heard music begin to play.

Rock. Hard rock. Like, opening-chord riff rock. Probably American.

_See me ride out of the sunset…_

Female voice. Older woman. Off-key. She turned to the TV, saw the desert, saw something bright in the distance-

_On your Color TV screen…_

Okay. It was definitely coming from the TV. Had she turned it to some music video channel and forgotten? Dang. No. She was pretty sure she hadn’t.

She focused. Her hot water had to be ready by now, right? If this was some sort of stupid martial-arts trick she wanted to at least be male to meet it. Anything Goes TV-manipulation? Would be all but useless in anywhere except an electronics store…

_Out for all that I can get…_

The voice was louder. She hadn’t turned the volume up, so that was strange. She could hear the nuance of the voice better. She sounded slightly sloshed.

_If you know what I mean._

Whoever it was, she just dropped her voice like two octaves. Like she was going from ‘hello ma’am nice to meet you’ to ‘your son calls me mommy too’-

_Women to the left of me…_

No no no no no. She was not a pervert. Akane could complain all she wanted, but she had never even so much as _touched_ those gravure mags Hiroshi and Daisuke wanted to sell him on. Never mind Akane - Kasumi would hate him, Nabiki would extort him for the rest of all time-

_And women to the riiiiiiiiight…_

Actually, now that she looked closer, there was something on that TV desert road. Kinda bright and shiny. Getting bigger fast.

_Ain’t got no gun!_

It was pink. Like, bright neon pink. A car, some American make she didn’t recognize.

_Ain’t got no knife!_

Holy shit. She could hear the engine roaring-

_Donchu start no fiiiiiiight…_

The pink car had grown to fill the entire screen. There was a woman in the driver’s seat.

Waitaminut. She was the one singing. The one driving.

_Cause I’m-_

She was heading straight for her!

_T.N.T!_

In the course of that single acronym several things happened.

First, Ranma scrambled back on instinct. It was a good instinct, too, because at the next moment the car grew to fill the screen, pushing through it like a film of glass - then bursting through.

Second, Ranma began to scream. Loud. Hard.

For, third, the car and the woman inside it had begun to expand beyond the proportions of the television as it left its confines, expanding out like some sort of trans-dimensional singing balloon monster, engine howling like the angels of the apocalypse. It seemed to angle up for a moment-

Then the car burst through the outer confines of the Tendo’s house, smashing through the paper screen leading out to the koi pond effortlessly, slamming down onto the wooden floor-

And before Ranma could so much as run, the woman reached out a mocha-brown hand, grabbed her by what little collar she had, and tossed her into the passenger’s seat.

The woman kept singing. Ranma kept screaming.

_I’m dy-no-mite!_

They shot through the wall around the dojo even faster, reinforced bunker-grade concrete that the Tendos had put up in the blind hope of deterring Shampoo shattering like glass, not even scratching the car. The music was still going - some very deep part of Ranma’s brain that hadn’t been paralyzed in cosmic dread was going _huh, so it’s a karaoke track-_

 _T.N.T!_ _And I’ll win the fight!_

The car swerved, a perfect 90-degree angle cleared in about three feet. Ranma’s martial artist senses kicked in, and she tried to kick herself out of the car- but it was no good. Somewhere in all that mayhem the woman had somehow secured her with a seatbelt that would _not_ come off.

She kept screaming-

And then the car screeched to a halt.

The volume dropped like a eunuch’s nuts after castration-

And then the woman reached out a hand and slapped her. Hard.

Ranma shut up.

“Oi!” the woman said, as Ranma briefly saw double from the force of the blow. “What the hell’s your problem? Ty’rs pubic hair, it’s like I’m kidnapping you or something!”

Ranma’s mouth moved faster than her brain. “Oh so this isn’t a kidnapping! Well la-de-fuckin-da I never realized that! Whadda revelation! Fuck you crazy bitch!”

“Aw c’mon, you knew this was coming, don’t try to- hollllld up.”

Ranma gulped. The woman was glaring at her the same way Akane did just before she’d punt her stratospheric, pointing a long manicured nail at her. The rock music kept on going, droning really. Ranma could vaguely hear shouting behind her, sounded like the Tendos. Maybe they could rescue her from this crazy magical woman?

Somehow she doubted it. Somehow, given the look the woman was giving her, she doubted she’d live long enough.

“You’re Ranma Saotome, right? ‘Cause last I checked, Ranma Saotome is a dude.”

Instinct kicked in. “I AM A GUY!” Then she gulped again, because maybe she could have fooled this psycho into thinking she was some relation but it was way too late for that now.

The woman blinked. Squinted at her. “Ahhhh,” she said. “Jusenkyo Curse. Right.”

With that, she stepped on the gas, and then they were moving, past the Tendo dojo, through the suburbs of Nerima well beyond the residential speed limit, towards - what?

Well, Ranma had to admit, she had no dang idea what.

Okay. Okay. Fuck. She had to calm down. This would be so much easier if she were in boy-form. She clenched her fist, channeled her ki, prepared to unleash a hypersonic punch-

“Don’t.” The woman held up her hand, but stayed focused on the road.

Her arm _froze_. Her ki channels went haywire as blood seemed to drain from that arm. And the woman seemed unfazed.

Actually, now that she got a closer look at the woman, she was - attractive. Older than Ranma, if the platinum-white hair was any indication, but her face seemed smooth and ageless, her eyes a strange deep purple. She was - curvy. Like, Shampoo or Ukyo curvy, everything put in just the right place, her mocha skin - was she some sort of foreigner or something? - flowing in soft, pillowy motions into cleavage that seemed to have no end to it save her sparkly purple dress. Actually, now that she thought about it, this woman was in some sort of fancy evening wear. The kind of thing Ranma had tried to seduce Ryoga with that one time. And those markings on her face? What the hell were those?

“So anyway, Ranma,” the woman said as if she hadn’t just snatched her out of her home in the most bizarre way possible, “Happy Birthday! As a little present, I’m gonna take you to this nice little hostess club I know out in Shibuya, and then we’re gonna talk business, m’kay?”

“What?”

The woman turned to look at her, then tapped a button on the car’s console. The roof closed up - of course it was a convertible, Ranma thought.

“Okay, sorry about that. There’s this place in Shibuya called the Kabuki Riverbed where they’ve got lots of girls and they don’t really follow the usual legal shit, so I figured we’d pop your cherry - you are a virgin, right? At least in boy form?”

Ranma blanched. “Whaaaaa?” Managed to squeak together a coherent response. “What kinda question is that?”

“It’s a little personal, I know, but since we’re starting what could be one of the most important chapters of your mortal life I figured it’s best to start things off on the right foot. Make you a real man, you know?”

“I am a man! It’s a-”

“Ancient Chinese curse! I know, I know. I can read your energy sig. Not that hard to do.”

“Ugh. Look, lady, I don’t even know you, and I have a fiance - okay, more like three fiances, but any one of them will kill me if I go off to some-”

The car pulled over and stopped. The woman looked like she was about to chew her head off, starting with her face and ending with her pigtail.

“You don’t know me.”

“Nope. I mean, maybe we met? Maybe my dad engaged me to you for two thousand yen or something, but I’m telling you I’ve already got fiances plural so if you could just pop my seatbelt-”

The woman promptly whacked her head against the steering wheel. Raised her neck back to a straight position. Did it again. Clutched the wheel like it was a neck she was wringing.

“Arrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhh. Of course he didn’t. Of course that prick tried to think he could run and hide, huh? Didn’t believe me? Didn’t even bother to thank me for everything I did. Insolent sack of lard.” She whirled to face him, her eyes almost glowing with restrained fury.”

“Alright, Ranma. Let’s start this over. You’re Ranma Saotome, son of Genma Saotome. You both, I assume, do martial arts. You turn into a girl when splashed with cold water and back into a man when splashed with hot water. Correct?”

“Um. Yeah.”

Great! Her plump lips curved into a broad smile. “I’m Urd. Goddess Second Class Limited License. As of today, your eighteenth birthday, I’m your patron deity, and you’re my hero. In the Greek sense, of course.”

“Waitwhat?” Goddess? License? Patrons? Gods were bad enough, especially pricklords like that Saffron guy. This Urd lady didn’t give off the same vibes, but if she could TV-teleport - use magic like it was nothing - she probably was. But - “Patron what now?”

“Look, you’re probably too old to remember any of this shit, it was eight years ago. Just - I’m a goddess, I’m large and in charge, and we’ll just leave it at that. Now,” she grinned, “You wanna lose your man-virginity in a few hours?”

Ranma’s mind and ghost-libido warred with each other with the ferocity of clashing armies. Citadels fell, cannons thundered, dick jokes were made. Neither side won. “Um - Yes! I mean no! I mean yes but!”

“Yes but?”

“I mean I-” How to put it? _I want to lose my virginity with Akane?_ Yeah right. Like she’d even let him. And the others - oof. Possible, but there would be consequences. So - “I, uh, I can’t?”

“Really,” Urd cooed. “You mean you can’t put out? Limp Bizkit, as they say in America? That’s unfortunate…”

“NO!” Like hell he was gonna let anyone dispute his manhood! “My peepee works fine, I’ll have you know! It’s of average length, and uh, operation!”

“So what do you mean when you say-”

“Oh come on! I’m engaged! I have a fian- _three_ fiancees! I have obligations! I-”

Urd shushed him with a single finger. “So. Sexually repressed? You get out much? Play around with girl form?”

“I’m not tellin’ you!”

“Oh yes-you-are,” Urd singsonged. “Like I said, I’m a goddess. Your patron goddess. So we’re going to be spending a lot of time together, okay?”

Ranma hmphed, crossed her arms. “Like hell we are. I just said-”

“Yeah. I heard you. So, these fiancees. Tell me about them.”

“No.”

“Really.”

“No.”

“Gonna play the petulant toddler on me, kid?”

“What the hell does petulant mean?”

“It - whatever. I tell you what. You answer me three questions and I’ll let you call home and explain where you are. Not a rescue operation, but just a little explainer, so no one starts calling the cops. Then we go someplace nice. No sex, just a bar or something.” She burped. “I need a drink, though. Then I’ll explain all the stupid shit your deadbeat dad _conveniently neglected to tell you_ about the nature of the contract he and I made back in ‘88, when you were ten. Then you go home, go to bed, begin your life as an adult. Everyone’s happy.”

Ranma stared at her. “So you’ll let me call but not, you know, beg to be rescued?”

“You won’t want to do that. Once I get your dad on the line everything will be made very clear.”

“Uh. Okay. But you call first, then you get to ask questions.”

“Great.”

“And I get to give you evasive answers so I don’t have to explain nothing.”

“Nice to know in advance.” Urd beamed like a model, started her car again, then pulled out a big fat carphone. She dialled the number.

Beep. Beep. Beep. On and on they drove. It was some sort of hands-free model, Ranma guessed. Cool.

Wait, no, not cool. He still had no idea if he was going to have his kidneys ripped out by magical Yakuza or not.

Then again - Urd. Name felt familiar. A monosyllabic click of the tongue. And it stood to reason his dad didn’t tell him about some hot goddess with magical TV powers. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, was the Genma motto.

And then the phone picked up.

“Hello, Tendo Residence.” Yep, Soun. Sounding like he had officially resigned from the prime position of Giving A Shit.

“He-llo!” Urd said in a girlish voice before Ranma could cut in, then shushed him again. “I need to talk to Genma Saotome, if you’d be so kind.”

“Ah, Mister Saotome is not at home at the moment. I’m afraid-”

“Buuuuuuuuuuuulllllllllllllshit,” Urd drawled. “I’ve got his son with me in my very nice pink cadillac. I want to, let’s say, discuss terms.”

“Ah, you’ve kidnapped Ranma! Well, why didn’t you just say so?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a _kid_ napping per se. More like an impromptu night out on the town. So if you’d be so kind-”

“Alright. Genma!” Soun shouted. “It’s for you! Some woman who says she’s with Ranma!”

“Growf!” was the muted reply on the other end.

“Ah, Genma is currently a little - unable to communicate verbally right now. Well, you’ll just have to try again at a later-”

“DAD!” Ranma shouted into the phone. “GET YOUR DUMB FURRY ASS OVER HERE THIS INSTANT! WHY THE HELL DID YOU CONTRACT ME WITH SOME CRAZY MAGIC LADY WHO SAYS SHE’S GODDESS?!”

“Growf growf growf growf growf!”

“AND CHANGE BACK INTO HUMAN FORM WHILE YOU’RE AT IT!”

“Growf Growf-” There was a splash of water on the other end, and then it sounded like someone else grabbed the phone.

“Ranma!” Yep. That was dad alright. “You insolent fool! Getting into some strange woman’s car at this hour! What, you think this is some sort of special Ranma day-”

“I told you like an hour ago it was my birthday,” Ranma deadpanned. “Not surprised you forgot, dad, just kinda disappointed.”

“And you! Urd! Just what business do you have with my son? You’d best not use your powers to seduce him or I’ll come down there and screw - I mean kick your ass myself!”

“WHO’S SEDUCING RANMA?!” Oh shit. He could hear Akane all the way over there.

“Ugh,” Urd cringed. “Sorry. Migraine. Anyway. Yeah. I have business with your son regarding his contract with me. You know the one?”

“Oh I do, do I now?”

“Yeah. The one where, in return for the unsealing of the tomb of a Taoist Immortal and all the relevant items therein, I became your son’s patron deity and claim him as my hero once he turns eighteen?”

“Ha! Then you’re out of luck, because Ranma is still seventeen! You’ve got - uh- Oh. Right. Birthday. My bad.” Silence. “You know none of those scrolls were useful, right? I was very clear about how useless they were. So the contract’s null.”

“You mean you had the recipe for Chinese Kunlun Fried Chicken, the creamy fried meats of the highest tiers of the heavens, and that doesn’t count?”

“I wanted secret techniques! Fireballs! Energy Beams! Duplication!”

“That is your problem,” Urd singsonged. “It is _so_ not mine.”

“I demand an expansion of the contact, or its prompt nullification. Alright?”

Ranma gasped. Dad was gonna bail him out here?

“In exchange for twenty-four hours of divine-tier pleasure, plus three hours every other Sunday to help me master my marital techniques, I’ll let you do as you please with my son?”

Aaaaaaaaaaand there went any chance of a son/daughter-father bonding experience. Hoo boy.

“Ha!” Urd laughed. “Let’s be real, Lard Lad McDonutstein. Just seven minutes in literal heaven would leave your gristly ass bent out of shape in so many different ways you wouldn’t be able to stand up for the rest of your life. ‘Sides, deal’s a deal. Divinities don’t do escape clauses.”

“Well.” Genma swallowed. “Alright, then. So he’s your hero, that means what?”

“Just that I get to call on him to do manly deeds, defeat sinister demonic forces, and further the cause of good, ‘good’ being defined in the Yggdrasil legal code as-”

“Of course, of course. And then he marries Akane and joins the schools.”

“That’s on him, Bloatkins. If he backs out he backs out. I’m under no liability to enforce some separate mortal marriage contract you’ve got stapled to his ass on the side.” Urd scratched her neck. “I can fax you a copy of the contract if you like, your familial seal signed in blood and all.”

“Oh. No. That won’t be necessary.”

Was it his imagination, or did he imagine his dad cracking that big-toothed shit-eating grin that seemed to adorn his face whenever he found something worth his time?

“AKANE!” Genma shouted. “RANMA’S RUN OFF WITH SOME LOOSE WOMAN!”

“Oh fuck me,” Ranma muttered as she heard the phone be handed off to some other grip. Okay, fine, he’d just have to explain that his dad was lying - again - 

_“RAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNMMMMMMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”_

“Akane wait I can explain-”

“ _IDIOT! SLEAZE! PERVERT! SCUM! SLIMY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING-CREEPY-”_

“HE LIED, OKAY? SHE KINDA KIDNAPPED ME AND MY DAD LIED! GOD DAMN AKANE! YOU KNOW HE’S FULLA SHIT! STOP YELLING AT ME!”

Silence. Urd had this look on her face like she’d withdrawn solely into driving, her eyes sunken and just a little baggy. Then:

“Hmph. If you were a real martial artist you wouldn’t have been kidnapped!”

“Okay. You know what? I’m not gonna rise to that insult. Yes, I’ve been semi-kidnapped by a goddess. She teleported out of the TV, remember? Blew up half the house? Not a lot martial arts can do against that.”

“Not even the Hiryu Shoten Ha Revised?”

“That worked _one_ time. And I was kinda desperate. And it was in an open area, and Saffron actually had a battle aura, and-”

“Okay, okay! Jeez!” Akane huffed. “I’m sorry, okay? I know you had kind of a crummy birthday. This probably isn’t helping.”

“Oh. Thanks for remembering, Akane.” A year or two ago she would have said _yeah and it sucked because you tried cooking again_ , but something held her back. Decency? Maybe. Wasn’t she a decent person already, though? Ugh.

“So you haven’t taken this loose woman to some sketchy love hotel, ordered the cheapest suite possible, and let her tie you down and have your way with you and turn you into a girl and then have your way with _her_ and shove the handle of a riding crop up her-”

“No.”

“Oh. Then-”

“We’re just gonna talk,” Urd butted in. “Just gonna talk about his, uh, life situation. And then he’ll be back in a few hours. I think.”

“You promise?”

“I mean,” Ranma said, looking at the expression on Urd’s face, “I think it’s kinda out of my hands.”

“Fine. Then, _you_ promise. Urd.”

“Very well - Akane, was it? I promise to make sure Ranma isn’t going to love hotels and doing all that stuff you just brought up, and that he’s back home in a few hours. Does that cool your burning passion, my sweet?”

“Uh - M-m-m-my sweeeeeeee-”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Bye Bye!”

“Like I’d ever have burning passion for that-”

Urd hung up, then looked at Ranma funny. “That’s one of your fiances?”

“That's one of your three questions?”

“Sure. We’ll go with that.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“You guess. That’s not a question.”

“Yes it is.”

“Well then, let me rephrase things. Why in the name of Thor’s thundering man-titties do you have three fiances?”

Ranma began to count off on his fingers. “Well, Akane and me were properly engaged a couple of years ago - Ucchan I guess we were engaged when I was really little but I don’t think it would hold up in court, y’know? - and Shampoo it was one of her wacky Chinese Amazon laws, you know, he who defeats you in combat you must get all, you know - Uh, I don’t _think_ Kodachi has any legal claim but she’s richer n’ God and probably could _get_ one if she wasn’t so crazy… Yeah. I think that’s about it.”

“Alright.”

Holy shit on a swing. Urd wasn’t fazed. Not even unnerved. All her teachers except Hinako, probably the most normal people in his corner of Nerima, thought her particular situation was - gross? Archaic? Resolvable? Urd bit her plush lip.

“So. This has been going on for awhile now, I assume - that’s not a question - by the way. So if you have several beautiful babes cavorting around in your life, all of them eligible candidates for marriage - why don’t you pick one? Last I checked, most Japanese or Chinese girls didn’t look highly on harems.”

“Hey!” Ranma huffed. “I’m a perfectly decent person. Perfectly decent. Just, you know. Extenuating circumstances.”

“That’s a non-answer if I ever heard one.”

“It’s an answer, though. So ha ha.”

Urd grinned to herself, gave him a sly look. “You want them all, then?”

“I just said I’m a perfectly decent person! I ain’t Kuno or nothin’!”

“Don’t know who that is, don’t particularly care. Okay, fine then. You’re waiting for your true love to enter from afar, who’ll so conclusively kill off these girls’ claims that everyone will wonder how they were so wrong about you.”

“What the what the huh?”

“Hm. So you know which one you like, but you’re such a waffler that you can’t commit to just taking her to your room and bending her over-”

“I’m not a pervert! Akane thinks I’m a pervert but I’m not I’m not I’m not I’m not! I just sometimes turn into a girl because-”

Urd slapped her again.

When he recovered, she just kinda stared at her for awhile, her cheek still marked with her handprint. “Fuck was that for.”

“Nothing. You’re just repeating yourself is all. Besides - we’re here.”

It was true. Wherever here was, it looked like the kind of place a woman like her would frequent in an outfit like that. Looming buildings, Neon lettering ten stories above him, AC units sticking out of the walls like tumors. There was a little stairway a few meters ahead of them, leading down into who-knew where. Urd stopped the car.

“This is-”

“Shinjuku, baby!” Urd squealed. “Land of the rising _fun_ ! Booze, boobs, bullets, blood - I keep trying to sell Kodansha on a manga set around here, big ensemble cast production, but they never go for it. Added a hot chick on a motorcycle who kills people with a scythe to the second draft. _Still_ didn’t get it in. I shoulda done a light novel, that’s what the otaku like these days…”

“Wait, what part of bullets and blood is fun?”

“What, you can’t handle yourself in a fight? Your dad could nuke lesser dragons and you can’t live up to that.”

Ranma growled. “Never tried. I don’t _think_ I’m bulletproof.” If this was going to be her life now, she’d have to get Cologne to train her the way she had Ryoga, with the rocks and everything. Only Cologne never did anything for her that didn’t somehow drag him closer to Shampoo. That would be problematic. Akane would try to do it and probably get herself killed, and she’d have to bail her out, and then she’d punch her because she was fine on her own, but nooooooooo-

Urd waved a hand in front of Ranma’s face. “Yello? Earth to Ranma? Look, that was a joke. Okay? Joke. Funny. Laugh. You probably won’t get shot tonight. Probably.”

“Probably. Right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may have been a mistake.
> 
> I suppose now is as good a time as any to say that I've decided to put Vigilante's Run on the back burner, and take Song of Silverhand out behind the shed so to speak. Gee, what a big surprise, STMPD having the attention span of a cocaine-addled gnat.
> 
> I've got other projects I'm working on, of course. The BGC 2069 RPG is still technically active, I'm just taking a break from it for burnout reasons. And I'm working on a BGC reboot screenplay, too. You can find that on the Drunkard's Walk Forums. This, on the other hand, is something new entirely.
> 
> I got the idea a year or two ago when I was trawling the archives of the now-defunct Anime Addventure. Tendency to devolve into sleazy rutting aside, some truly excellent collaborative stories were told there, especially 80's sci-fi homage Enforced Evolution. Anyway, there was this storyline where Ranma and the various women vying for his affection all were telepathically linked by a genie as a wish gone wrong sort of thing. It was very amusing, with all the different characters having their internal monologues, color-coded, running over one another.
> 
> Anyway, Belldandy dialed it back, only for Urd to show up. Turned out she was Ranma's patron goddess, and that, in typical Urd fashion, she had decided NONE of Ranma's fiancees were worth his time - and telepathically linking them was just making it worse.  
> Of course the thread ended there. But it got me thinking.
> 
> And then I started reading Ah! My Goddess for real a few days ago. Which is, I believe, perhaps one of the most wholesome comics in human history. Even if plenty of fanfiction, including this one, starts from the premise of 'fuck it let's throw in some sex and violence and raunchy humor', there's something about the purity of it all - radiating from Belldandy and her sheer waifu-ish-ness - that keeps one slogging through the manga.
> 
> Well, my winter college term starts tomorrow, but today I hacked together this whole - thing. It starts abruptly, I know. I guess I need to get around to putting together Ranma's bad day - and Urd's worse one - to set this whole thing up. Or maybe I don't. Maybe Urd ramming a pink Cadillac through the poor boy-girl's house is enough of a big ol' moment to get things started on a high-energy note.
> 
> Will I update this later? Not sure. I have ideas for it, arcs and whatnot. Some thoughts on possible wacky lore to expand the AMG universe - but then again this is predominantly a crossover fic, with equal amounts of Ranma and AMG mixed together. Weigh one or the other two heavily and the whole balancing act falls apart, you've got a fic about Urd where Ranma is just kinda there, or a Ranma fic where Urd just hovers menacingly in the background. And I think this chunk of prose, which is mostly the two main characters bickering past each other, does that well. It's fun, which is more than I can say of the aggressively grim tone of Vigilante's Run and all the other BGC stuff I've written. 
> 
> But who knows? Maybe I'll get back to a BGC-related project. Maybe I'll lose interest in this little thing, and it will stand as a monument to the one time a more serious writer tried to write a 'shenanigans' fic. Or maybe I'll write serious stuff for school and embrace the shenanigans here. Or maybe it will become a serious fic?
> 
> Dang. I need some space to figure this out. Stay safe, okay folks? Try hard not to doomscroll through the news. Get by. Wear a mask. Respect quarantine.
> 
> Think of what Belldandy would do.


	2. In which setup is revealed, a Goddess descends to craven Depths, and emerges from them with a brilliant idea

**BIFROST BARNEY’S PUB N’ GRILL, VANAHEIM, MIDDLE YIGGDRASIL**

**A FEW DAYS AGO**

It was not exactly the place most would have expected to find the Norn of What Was. Bifrost Barney’s was for veteran battle gods to kick back, relax, and debate Midgard politics. It had seen plagues, mortal realm wars, divine wars from the upstart Pantheons - they’d just put down another Huitzilopochtli who had gotten uncomfortably close to actually putting out the sun - economic crashes, even the Hindu KarmaKred Crunch of 1974. It had been an institution of growly bearded dudes, was an institution for growly bearded dudes, would probably be such a thing many millennia into the future sort of another Ragnarok.

It also held, so legend said, some of the finest sake ever brewed by the Lucky Gods Consortium before they’d folded after the Showa period came to an unfortunate end. They had Amaterasu’s voucher on the casks and everything. Urd had never tried such high-quality rice wine before, and as part of her ongoing quest to sample the finest divine liquors possible in the span of a handful of Happy Hours, she had sauntered into Bifrost Barney’s with a few quintillion Yggbucks in a little cloth wallet, slammed the thing down on the counter, and told the bartender to break out the big guns for a big lady.

That had been - oh, four hours ago. Most of the bar’s patrons, even the ex-Valkyrie lesbians who had been eyeing her in a corner for a good hour or two - no one dared challenge a half-Demoness to a drinking contest, not even the kind of girls who made Tank Girl look like Martha Stewart - had left. And Urd was still there. Her cognitive capacities cut, cut, cut again, her brain pickled by Amaterasu’s finest, her body trying to figure out if it wanted to sleep on the nice soft bar or just black out altogether, shut down, reboot. Try turning off and on again. Maybe everything would be better after that.

“Milk, bartender. Whole, and _hot_.”

Urd turned her head, and was not surprised to see her littlest sister on the barstool next to her, half-dressed in her work clothes and completely unaware of what the tank-top-and-overalls look was doing to the male deities in the room.

Somewhere in the back of her brain, she thought about milk. Heh. White. Whole. High-fat content. And _hot_ , too. He he he he-

“Big sis! C’mon! Snap out of it!”

“Dunwana,” Urd grumbled. She groped to her left, realized someone had taken her sake bottle. Struggled to care enough to do something about it. Failed miserably.

Skuld hmph’d, putting her impish little face into a pout of sorts. Had she not crossed her arms, she probably would have sent her chest a-jiggling again, which would have had even worse effects on those same male deities.

“Fine then. See what I get for being nice to my big bumbling joke of a big sister.”

“Wha? Whazzat?” Urd’s synapses, despite being shaped from one-hundred-eight-dimensional biocomputronium in the Akashic Forge of Inception, were mushy, barely firing, but something in the divine equivalent of her lizard brain detected insult. “Youwannago, titsmcgee?”

Skuld blushed. Full-body blushed. “I - just because I have stupid cow udders like you doesn’t mean you can call me stuff like that! I’m trying to _help_ you, Urd! Acknowledge that for _once_!”

“Well la-de-fuckin-dah, m’ lil’ sister wants to helllllp.” Her eyes narrowed. “Wassat mean, Kong-Skuld-Island? Gonna stick a manifold zero-point reactor up my azz? Like you did with that lil’ Banpei-thingmaboob?”

“THAT WAS AN ACCIDENT!”

Silence. Then, Urd said:

“See? Yur sad too.” She turned to the bartender. “Oi, Heimdal! Gimme siz here a big ol’ thing a’ blue- _sake_!

The bartender - his name, in fact, was Heimdal, the former Gatesman of the Yggdrasil, she wasn’t wrong on that account - looked at Skuld, who glared at him.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m cutting you off. She doesn’t want any, and you’re not getting any either.”

“Ooooooohhhhhhh,” Urd cooed, her lower lip flapping up and down. “Big Heimdalzagona tell a fuckin’ Norn to hold her liquor? Big balls for a lil’ god.”

“Uh-” Skuld reached out for Urd’s shoulder before she could continue.

“Yep,” Hemidal said, cool as you please. “Look, there are lots of types of drunk that I’m perfectly willing to tolerate here. Most of the time, you fall into the ‘sexy fun’ type of drunk or just ‘sexy bored’. Both attract customers. But sad isn’t sexy, okay? You know that as well as I do.”

“Ssssssooooo?”

“So I’m cutting you off until you can get drunk _properly_. Not, like, Valhalla-grade wasted, but more just - buzzed. Tipsy. Willing to lose at cards or something.”

“Arrrrrrrrrrrrr-”

“Okay, and _that’s_ my cue,” Skuld chirped, lifting Urd up from her barstool, slinging her over her shoulder in one motion, and moving to leave. “Let’s not have a fight in the middle of happy hour, okay big sis?”

“arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryouuuuummmmmMMMMMMOOOOOOOTHERFUCKER!”

Heimdal swallowed.

“CASCADE FAULT SIX: BEEZLEBUB’S WALTZ!”

And then everything exploded.

* * *

**THE WORLD FOUNDRIES, LOWER YGGDRASIL**

It was once said by the great demigod philosopher Eribodi Wang-Chung To’ni’te that watching the World Foundries during the first stages of solar formation was the most beautiful sight in all the Processes of the Yggdrasil. He would later add caveats to the statement - one had to have a high enough divine license to actually perceive gamma flux, and have a working knowledge of Unified Field Bullshit to understand _what_ one was looking at - and he built the thesis into a unified theory of Beauty and Love. Many of his manuscripts had been fragmented, corrupted in the databases, and so the theory had been watered down to a few maxims, mostly bandied about by amateur love goddesses at the Discord Festivals, things like ‘If you don’t get it, you don’t get it’, which - what? What the fuck was that? Urd would have liked to find the god who thought raising a halfling to be a philosopher was a good idea and zapped him out of existence.

Because he was wrong.

Oh, Urd had believed in beautiful things, once. Had taken an interminable number of beings, mortal and immortal and in-between, on dates to the Foundries. And none of them had _ever_ lasted longer than three dates. None.

So sitting here, on some zottablock of variable-phase data floating above the whole kerfuffle - as a nebula responded to the wending and weaving of spacetime itself, particles of aether slowly sticking together to form a white-hot point of superheavy fusion over millennia of folded time - she couldn’t help thinking all the thoughts she hadn’t wanted to think.

She couldn’t help leaning on Skuld’s shoulder, staying silent as Skuld lost herself in her running commentary on how _fascinating_ the process was, and how her newly installed drivers were _totally_ going to make sure this one was a _super-_ habitable system, even more habitable than Earth itself, a new milestone in His Works, and trying not to cry.

She couldn’t help grabbing her little sister around the shoulders and sobbing like a sloshed schoolgirl. Really. Couldn’t help it.

“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! SKUUUUUUUUUULLLLLLLLLLLLLLD!”

“What!” Skuld blanched, tried to dislodge her eldest sister.

“NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ME! EVERYONE THINKS I’M A PIECE OF SHIT BUT I’M NOOOOOOOOT!”

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“I’M A WOMAN WITH NEEDS, SIS! NEEEEEEEEEDS! AND I CAN’T HAVE THEM BECAUSE EVERYONE HAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTEEEES ME!”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but Heimdal’s not letting you back in after-”

“EVERYONE HATES ME! EVERYONE! BELLDANDY WON’T EVEN TALK TO ME BECAUSE SHE’S JUST PUMPING OUT BABIES LIKE A STORK FACTORY, HER AND KEICHII! WAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-”

“Don’t speak that way about Big Sister!”

“MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMAAWAWAAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWWAAAAAAAA…”

Skuld slapped her. _Hard_. Like, level-empires-topple-mountains-reroute-rivers hard. Urd could take it, though. She just groaned and slumped against her little sister.

“What was that for…”

“Oh for Pete’s sake, Urd!” Skuld squealed. “You’re acting absolutely _awful_! That’s why everyone’s mad at you! Like a two-dimensional version of all the mean things people say about you! Like you want to validate them!”

“Hrm. Maybe I _do_. Ever think about that, Skuld?”

“No you don’t. You’re just - you’ve been like this ever since we all went back to Heaven.”

“Ever since Belldandy hooked up with everyone’s favorite patron deity of small-engine motorcycles or whatever the fuck. Yeah. Yeah. I’m pissed.”

“Okay, seriously? You were like their number one cheerleader! Trying to get Bell and that mortal to act like lovey-dovey Arthurian legends. And then they did. So-”

“Yeah-”

“So where’s the satisfaction from a job well done?”

Urd thought about that for a moment. Reached out towards the forge, cupped her hand in a current of tachyons, watched Cherenkov rainbows pulse around her fingers, light trapped in time and unsure of its own properties.

“Don’t do that,” Skuld said.

“Why not?”

“You know why. You were one of the initial designers for rapid worldforging, remember?”

“Yuh-huh. Me and half a dozen third-rate sun deities who all thought having a solar process depend on active faith and sacrifice was a good motivator. Turns out some people would rather live in darkness then have to be slaves to light.” But Urd lifted her hand out of the current, let time flow as it had to, trapped photons swirling around her hand as she brushed her neutron-white hair before colliding with her passive field of hyperexotic quasiparticles. Her nails glowed with the light of bosonic self-annihilation.

“Okay. That was really deep, and really cool you said that, but what does that actually mean?”

“I’unno.”

“Okay. You didn’t answer my first question…”

“Because at some point you get sick of it. Sick of all of it. Playing the mastermind. Building little mechanisms and letting them run their course ‘til entropy wears ‘em down. Same as it ever was.”

“Oh sweet _Jesus_ ,” Skuld moaned. “That’s what being the Norn of the Past means. Time runs forward, you look backward. You remember all that shit ‘cause it’s your job.”

“And you? I make you build useless machines as punishment. You hate that same as I do.”

“No,” Skuld intoned. “I hate building _useless_ machines because they add to net entropy. A well-functioning system - like the Foundries, actually - works with the laws of physics to create higher-order complexity, and you can always build on that. Write new rules on top of the old ones. That - that _never_ gets old, because there’s always something new to discover! Some new quirk in Yggdrasil’s infinite permutations that surprises our boxed-in minds! Some new problem to take apart and put back together the _right_ way! Order - _our_ order - triumphing over chaos!”

Urd looked at Skuld. The other girl’s eyes were sparkling with the light of the unborn star, perfect mirrors. Yeah. Perfect. Just like Skuld.

Something she could never be.

“Well,” Urd managed to say, “That’s all fine-and-fucking-dandy for engineering nerds, but in case you haven’t noticed, even a perfect society like Heaven isn’t just made up of people like you.”

“I know. Art’s just a higher-order complex structure, Urd. Talking to parts of mortals they don’t understand. Parts maybe even _we_ don’t understand.”

“Huh. Great. The Gospel according to Skuld.”

“You don’t have a theory of everything, I know. Maybe that’s part of the problem?”

Urd laughed “I don’t have a theory of _anything_. Demonic nature, remember? Every time I think everything makes sense, I do something really fucking stupid and prove myself wrong.”

“Ehhhh - well, even demons have a specific code, right? Oppose all that is orderly, return all to chaos and mayhem, but don’t actually destroy the universe because there would be no point to chaos within a closed system. They’re not bad. Even if you have a demon in you, you’re not bad.”

“Nope. I’m worse. I’m neutral, Skuld. I can’t do anything good or bad. Half one, half the other. And what good’s that?”

“Uhh, you protect the balance between those two spheres so perfect chaos or unceasing order with no chance of variability or chance is ever possible? You wind the metanarrative strands of disparate conceptions of what _was_ into a definite timeline?”

“Yeah. I work. I do my work, and that’s all I do. All I ever can do. I couldn’t even just destroy everything if I tried, ‘cause you turned Fenrir into a corrupted floppy disc back in ‘91-”

“What? Oh. _Oh_. That. Yeah, that was pretty wacky, wasn’t it? I think even Hild Herself was surprised that you had that in you-”

“WELL I DON’T NOW, DO I?! I WAS GOING TO DO SOMETHING WHICH MEANT SOMETHING! END EVERYTHING! MAKE IT HOW _I_ WANTED IT! BUT NOW WHAT AM I, HUH? WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE PAST, HUH? EVER SINCE WAYNE’S WORLD IT’S NOTHING BUT NOW NOW NOW NOW! FUCKIN’ BELLDANDY’S THE TOP NORN NOW, NOT ME! AND NO MATTER WHAT I DO I CAN’T FORGET IT!”

Skuld leaned back, winced at the force of Urd’s outburst. “Okay,” she squeaked. “I did _not_ know you had these - feelings. This,” she waved her hand vaguely in Urd’s direction, who was sucking in breath after breath, “this is really awkward!”

“I’m sorry.” Urd deflated. “I - I need a vacation. Get that Keanu Reeves dude on the phone. Shag him until he suffers an aneurysm.”

“Urd,” Skuld huffed. “You _have_ been on vacation. You’ve got so little work done in the past few months that the Almighty just took it out of this century’s buffer. I’ve had to work with _Peorth_ to keep the pangalactic black hole network from suffering total vacuum collapse! That skank doesn’t know the difference between a _Tesla_ -style aether-theory and a _Dirac_ sea, it’s all gossip about who Dad’s shagging behind Ansuz’s back, and she’s _wrong_ and she’s a _slut_ and I hate it! So you have to come back and help me get physics to make sense again!”

“What’s the rush? CERN’s not gonna put a collider big enough to sense anything important until halfway through next century. We can fix up the code before then. Like putting lipstick on a syphilitic whore, sure, but as long as they don’t catch _on_ to the fact that we’ve got more spaghetti code in the Big Yigg than Chef Boyardee, we should be fine.”

Skuld rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’m just gonna ignore that really gross metaphor you just made up? And remind you that if you don’t do _something_ they’ll revoke your license and boot you back down to Niflheim. So at least take a working vacation. Like a business trip.”

Urd grinned. “Actually, that sounds kinda nice. Live life like we used to. Got anything for me in Tokyo? Some kinda diplomatic consulate thing where I can sit around and look important?”

“Big sis, the whole point is to make you _not_ think about lost love and _not_ think about that plum spirit dude and make you _work_! Carpe Diem and all that!”

“Fine. Is there any _work_ for me in Japan? Tokyo? Anywhere genuinely fun?”

“Lemme check.” Skuld brought up her holopad, pursed her lips as she swiped through results. “Huh. Well, how about that.”

Urd watched a particularly interesting bubble of interstellar gas begin the initial phases of fusion, collapsing in on itself. “You’ve got something.”

“Yeah. This - oh man. Uh, before you showed up with Keiichi, did you by any chance do anything interesting in 1988?”

Urd thought. “Oh. Yeah. There was that fat guy in China.”

“Yeahhhhhhhh, you helped him unseal some ancient Taoist’s tomb after he helped kill a minor dragonling in the mountains? And you, uh, made a contract with his ten-year old son. I’ve got his, uh, muddy handprint for a sig on the doc.”

Urd stiffened. “I _what_? With some kid?”

“It was the fat guy’s idea, I guess. You’d be his patron once he was mature enough, and he’d be your hero. You know - in the Greek sense.”

“Ohhhhhhh.” Recognition dawned on Urd like the sun breaking over Mount Fuji. “Fuck. I _did_ do that.”

“I didn’t even know we still _had_ the old Greek-style contracts, big sis. Wasn’t the whole point of blowing up Olympus to, y’know, cast off the shackles of the old systems and all that? Actually get to use GUI’s on our computers instead of command prompts?”

“Well,” Urd said. “They’re still around. I guess a couple of the turncoats - Minerva, Vulcan, the rest - thought it was important to keep options open in case there ever was another Dark Age like after the Big One. Make sure we could still operate through heroic proxies if we were swamped just trying to keep, you know, something like gravity consistent.”

“And you agreed to do this _why_?”

“Oh. Well, turns out the Taoist Immortals had some pretty great shrooms buried in their cave-tombs. All dried out and powdery, but that’s what a good dollar bill’s for. So I think I might have been a little high at the time. Just a little.”

Skuld gasped in mock surprise. “You did drugs that _weren’t_ alcohol?”

“It was the eighties, Skuld. Eight-balls weren’t just a fad. They were a way of life.”

“I never thought it was possible!” The younger goddess tried not to break out into laughter, keeping her voice high-pitched and straight-laced. “To think that my dearest sister would not heed the words of the great Nancy Reagan and Just Say No! Not Even Once! To imbibe the marijuanas and the coca-colas and the big drugs - the ones that they only can pronounce in Spanish! _LOS DRUGITOS!_ ”

“Yep. Sure did. Snorted the good stuff with Freud himself, back when it was cool and hip.”

“But that’s a gateway drug for a divine being! If you keep this up, you’ll start craving blood sacrifices, or mummifying politicians!”

“Look, that’s not the point. The point is I made a contract, and I’ve gotta honor it. Right?”

“Right.”

“So tell me about the kid.”

Skuld brought up the personnel file, and _dayum_. He looked good. Questioning blue eyes, muscular bod in a reasonably tight shirt, most of his pictures were of him punching large objects. She could work with that, maybe. Get him some golden fleeces to go a-questing for, if you know what she meant.

“Ranma Saotome - Third year at Furinkan Regional high school in Nerima, Tokyo - Current residence the Tendo Dojo - Dojo head Soun Tendo…”

Okay. Middle-aged. Long hair. Like a salaryman had crashed into a kung-fu hippie, was the vibe she was getting. This was that partner the fat guy had kept praising to high heavens? Jeez Louise.

“Head of the Anything-Goes School of Indiscriminate Martial Grappling - forbidden by shogun in 1745 after Incident Sizeable Narwhal - huh, that file’s above my clearance - really colorful history, these guys…”

“Stop wiki-wormholing, Skuld. Ranma. I wanna know about Ranma.”

“Father Genma Saotome - yep, that’s the fat guy - got a contract with him, already got that file up - trained by Access Denied - File name Black Forbidden - huh. Kinda Tom Clancy-ish name for some karate-kid dude…”

Urd reached over Skuld and began flipping files out of existence. “Don’t care. Okay, so Ranma’s a bigshot kung-fu dude. Big deal. Let’s get back to the basics, like the fact that there, in big red letters, you glossed over the status afflictions. Come _on_ , little sis.”

“Well excuse me for - whoa. That _is_ a big deal. Jusenkyo quantum oscillation syndrome?”

“Ancient Chinese Curse, is the politically incorrect term. Another fucked-up experiment courtesy of the Taoist Immortals. Whatever. So he changes into a girl. That’s - yeesh. Hard for a big hunk like him.”

“Hmph.” Urd could just imagine the _tsundere_ pout on Skuld’s cute little face. “So he has big muscles. Big deal.”

“You think _she’s_ a cute girl, too?”

“How would I know? I don’t spend all day thinking perverted thoughts like you.”

“Perverted thoughts, huh?” Urd stood up. Looked at the star being birthed in front of her. Buncha flashy lights. She could no longer give a shit. She turned on her heel. “Well, Skuld, sometimes perverted thoughts are the best kind of thoughts to have.”

“Wha- What does that even mean?!”

“Nothing!” Urd barked, marching barefoot across the data solid to the portal her sister had set up a few hours ago. “Absolutely nothing! Say, do I still have that pink Cadillac in my fabricatorium?”

“You’re going to break _that_ out?!” Skuld shrieked. “Belldandy will-

“Belldandy doesn’t have to know, does she? Not at least until it’s too late to stop me. And - yes. I’ve still got that bottle of Old Tennessee Jackoff in my private reserve - yeah, I get a little buzzed. His birthday’s coming up soon, right?”

“Four days? Then I guess you can, uh - what exactly are you going to do to him?”

“What am I going to do to him?! What am I going to do to him?!” Urd whirled around, her dress billowing in the windless space thanks to a bit of drama-magic. “Think bigger, sister dearest. Think - what am I going to do _for_ him.”

“That doesn’t answer my question at all.”

“Why, I’m going to make him a MAN! Urd cried to the silent heavens. “A hero who will be loved by all! A champion of awesome in these dreadfully _boring_ times! A transsexual Casanova who can turn any lonely girl’s frown upside down! Moisten her ovaries with a brush of his hair! Yes. Yes! YES! I’m going to make him-“

And here, Urd turned to leap through the portal-

“Into a Man among Men!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoo! It’s three in the morning and I DO NOT CARE! Here’s another chapter, the necessary exposition on Urd’s end! On the house! As all fanfiction is, of course. Mwah.
> 
> Anyway, I wrote down some wacky ideas for how to do this. I’m thinking just roll with the silly - screw any sort of long-term plot for the time being, just try to be funny without resorting to memes. Shouldn’t be too hard. I think.
> 
> I mean, I almost had Skuld say ‘Abrecht Macht Frei’ unironically here. That was tasteless, and also devolved into a whole paragraph about the shakeups in Asgard following WW2. Amusing to me, but ultimately one has to go with the ‘we don’t need no steenkin’ LORE!’ approach to a franchise like AMG. Whatev.
> 
> Next time: Urd attempts to get into a VIP suite in a seedy bar without paying! Has this woman no shame?! No, she’s working on a budget!


	3. In which the phrase 'make a contract with me and become a magical dude' is not used but really should have been

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes yes yes, Veteran of the Psychic Wars is copyright of the band Blue Oyster Cult.

Ranma was not impressed.

“You go to places like this to cement a business relationship?”

“You ever been in a business relationship?”

“No, but-”

“Then trust me.”

She did not.

The Burning Chrome Bar & Entertainment House was where that stairway went. Lit mostly by blacklights, bathing everything in a monochrome bluish-pinkish glow, with little bamboo plants in the corners of the otherwise mostly bare establishment, a disco ball frozen in the middle of the dance floor. It did not exactly scream ‘goddess watering hole’. It screamed ‘help me help me oh god help he’s going to-’

“Oi! Urd snapped her fingers as she sashayed up to the bar on her platform heels. The bartender tried to ignore her but didn’t do a very good job. “Service! I wants me some service here, Koichiro!”

“Oh, kami preserve us,” the bartender - Koichiro - muttered. “What kind of service, you Swedish skank? Fan service, perhaps?”

“I want the keys to the VIP suite. Now, if you’d be so kind.” She leaned on the bar, let her acres of cleavage bounce a little more free than usual, pouted her lips, batted her eyelashes. The bartender tightened his grip on the glass he was cleaning.

“Last time you said that we had serious problems, Urd. We’re still trying to get the stains out of the upholstery.”

“Uh-” Ranma hovered behind his goddess patron. “Say what now?”

“And who’s this? ‘Cause she looks kinda underage,” he said, leering at her. “No offense, sweetie.”

“I’m a guy. And I’m eighteen.”

“With a rack like that? Suuuuuuuure-”

“It’s an ancient Chinese curse,” Urd gushed. “Very unfortunate. She turns back into a he with hot water. No biggie, right? You can heat up some tea or something? You can at least do that?”

“Pay me. For tea. Actually, you know what, pay me your fifty thousand yen tab from the last time, and then another fifty for the VIP room. That’s reasonable, I think.”   
“Of  _ course _ it is,” Urd said, straightening herself up. “Ranma, can you spot me twenty thousand?”

“I’m a third-year in high school. Does that occupation scream ‘made of money’ to you, lady?”

“Well, then, Koichiro,” Urd said, reaching into her cleavage and pulling out - holy shit, those were ten thousand-yen bills in there. Where had she gotten - right. Magic. Stupid goddamn bullshit  _ magic _ . “If you’re man enough - you can have it all.”

Koichiro looked at her, his crooked teeth gritted together. “Oh no. Not this shit again. It’s probably only fifty thousand in there. Or it’s counterfeit. Or - no. I’m not doin’ it.”

“You can’t just magic up the money?” Ranma stage-whispered.

Urd sighed. “Limited license. I get a pretty strict budget for field ops. Listen,” she said, turning back to the bartender. “You know I’m good for it. A little probability tweak here or there. Go next door, try one of the pachinko machines. Watch your wildest dreams come true. I can make it happen. You just gotta-”

“Nope. Boss says we can’t allow chance magic after last month. It’s literally bad luck. Had some floozy from the Benten Corps come down and inspect the premises for that kinda thing.”

“Oh. So you’re going to take the word of an underling of a third-class, regional pantheon goddess, over  _ me _ ?”

“Yuh-huh. Boss says so.”

“Hmph.”

“Boss says so,” he repeated. To prove his point, he lifted what appeared to be a sawed-off shotgun from behind the bar, barrel gleaming in the low light. “So if you ain’t got real money, I think it’s best you just leave.”

Urd stared at the barrel of the implement being pointed at her. Ranma had to wonder - could goddesses bleed? Die? Be hurt by conventional weaponry? Did they have Kryptonite? He sort of wanted to find out. Hell, Saffron had folded up pretty bad when he shot that birdbrain with a Hiryu Shoten Ha, but that was  _ ki _ , so-

He never got a chance to find out, because about a second later Urd said, “So we’re just gonna ignore that you’ve fallen behind on your Minor Kami Service Registration?”

Kochiro pumped the shotgun, growled like a dog. “I don’t see how that’s relevant to any of this. Either you got money or you don’t.”

“Well, under Clause 33056, paragraph 47b of the Extra-Natural Being Health and Services Act, signed by the Almighty himself, any establishment which wishes to serve faith-based liquors to any unlicensed deities or spirits, including but not limited to urban legends, quasisentient netbots, insect hivemind manifestations, any hungry, angry, or hangry ghosts ranked Type-Thorn or higher, and so on and so forth, must register their hallowed ground mandala inscriptions on the third night of a given lunar cycle, or the Yggdrasil database will just, you know, fail to recognize you as a licensed establishment. And no offense, Kochiro, my dearest little shapestealing fuckboy, but I don’t sense so much as a stabilizing dreamcatcher here. Now, maybe I’m wrong-”

“You are-”

“But, of course, we could just check the database right now. See if you’re in there. But you aren’t, are you?”

Kochiro’s little moustache quivered. “Boss said we don’t need one. Called you guys a goddamn Swedish mythomafia. Ain’t no need t’ get registered for ‘hallowed ground’.”

“Oh, but there is! See, any place with enough ecto-energy floating around without a legal stabilizer is sort of like a big puddle of kerosene on an interperfectual highway. Sooner or later someone flicks a ciggy out the window, and KA-FOOM!” She mimed an explosion. “Anyone tries something and the whole thing goes up.”

“So?”

“So, I’m willing to, oh, let’s say, overlook your serving unlicensed theological booze to minors. Provided that you clear my tab. Provided you never so much as establish a tab on my ass. Provided you give me the key to the VIP room before Ranma here gets impatient-”

“We crossed that bridge a long time ago-” Ranma deadpanned.

“And she launches a big ol’ ki blast that renders your drink machines so much orichalcum scrap.”

“Hey!” Ranma squealed. “Since when did I become your hired muscle?”

“Since you turned eighteen, buckaroo.”

“Buckawhat now?”

Urd paused. “Buckaroo Banzai.” She snickered, giggled, then full-on guffawed. “Ha! God  _ Damn _ that was a good joke!”

Ranma had no idea what the goddess was talking about. “Listen, you…” Her battle aura began to flare up-

And Kochiro took a step back. “Whoa whoa whoa whoa. She’s kinda right about the explosion thing! If you don’t cool down the whole block’ll hear the boom!”

“Oh?” Urd said.

“Okay, okay, okay, look. Fine. You get the VIP suite. And she-he gets tea. But I’m not giving you nutjobs anything harder than San-Pelligrino. That’s a reasonable compromise, I think.”

“You think. Hrm.” Urd paused. “Fine. I can work with that.”

* * *

**One gender change, and one VIP access later**

“So what was that thing about him thinking?” Ranma asked. He sipped at his fizzy water. Tried not to think about the sizeable brownish stain on both the floor of the VIP room and the ceiling. And a wall or two.

“Eh, nothing. Kochiro looks human but he’s actually a shapestealer, type of slime mold that can project hallucinations n’stuff. Really looks like a human-shaped blob of oatmeal on the inside. Not a whole lot of real neurons firing there, if you catch my drift.”

“Uh. Okay. And he’s just gonna let us hang out here for free.”

“Ranma, dear, would you want to actually pay money for soft drinks and a seat like this?”

He looked around. Back at the stains that probably weren’t blood. “Right. Yeah. Okay.”

“To business, then. To a long and fruitful partnership.” Urd raised her glass. “Kampai?”

“Sure. Fine.” He raised his glass, clinked it against hers. “Woo. Yay.”

“Right then.” Urd said, before chugging her drink in one go. “Lemme just lay the law of the land out. Exposition time.”

Ranma grunted. “I thought we already were pretty clear. You tell me shit to do and I do it, right?”

Urd raised a finger. “Noooooooooo. Not quite. You need to think of this as less slave-driver and more Hot Fairy Godmother. I help you with your misfortunes, and  _ on top of that _ I also provide you with opportunities to win fortune and glory for yourself. I’ll even give you magical powerups for the really tricky stuff. That’s how generous I am.”

“Whoa,” Ranma said. “Whaddaya mean misfortunes?”

It was a defensive thing to say. It was also the wrong thing to say. Urd fixed him with a stare that he swore was digging around in some deep, nay,  _ cthonian _ part of his soul and fiddling with it.

“Really? A studly guy like you turns into a shortstack pipsqueak half the time ‘cause of a serious glitch in your localized probability field, you’re the son of a guy who makes Larry, Moe, and Curly look like Einstein, Newton, and Hawking, and you’ve got a woman who verbally abuses you on the regular for a fiancé. I mean, c’mon, what was that rant on the phone a few minutes ago?”

“Uh, that’s just - Akane. She’s like that sometimes.”

“Sometimes. Uh-huh. So how long have you two been fiances?”

“Oh, we’re asking personal relationship questions again?”

“Yes. We are. Remember, I’m not just some kidnapping-happy skank, I’m your Hot Fairy Godmother. So it’s my job - and my pleasure - to fix your love life.”

“You can do that. Sure. Start by lifting the curse and then I’ll believe you.”

Urd’s face puckered. “Can’t do that.”

“Oh. Really.”

“Ranma, come  _ on _ . A Jusenkyo curse is a pretty deep rewrite of the probability node that you call yourself, we’re talking digging into actor-liability source code that most goddesses don’t even recognize as proper linguistics. It was probably the biggest fuckup the Taoists ever performed after they managed to hack Yggdrasil’s quantum-oscillation resolution engine way back in the Neolithic.”

“Neo-what-now?”

“Doesn’t matter. Point is, short of finding an expert in some  _ very _ esoteric script monkeying, or dragging an Immortal back from death, which isn’t possible ‘cause we killed em’ all after the collapse of the Later Han, you’re stuck with that curse.”

“Oh.” Ranma tried very, very hard to not scream bloody murder at the goddess. 

Seriously. A magical being walked into his life  _ again _ , and she couldn’t fix his curse? Couldn’t do the one thing he’d in all honesty sell his  _ soul _ just to have a smidgen of control over?

“Hey. Ranma. Look at me.”

“WHAT.”

“I’m sorry, okay? Everyone I know who ended up with a Jusenkyo curse - the shock of having their brain reshaped into an animal form or whatever usually killed them on the first transformation. So you’re not just  _ lucky _ that your girl-form is essentially still  _ you _ , I think you might be stronger than about, oh eighty percent of those people.”

“Heh. ‘Course I am. I’m awesome. Fat lot of good it does me. I - look, for a while I couldn’t see my mom ‘cause she wanted, you know, a good son. A man.” He swallowed. He wasn’t going to tell this whole story. “Look. Whatever. No one gives a shit. I don’t - I don’t even mind being a girl half the time. It would just be nice if I had, like a schedule. Can you do that? Set it on a timer or something?”

“Ehhhh, maybe?” Urd leaned back, looked up at the ceiling. “The effect the curse has on your probability field probably pretty much does the same thing. Every attosecond you spend as a dude has to be counterbalanced by one as a girl, is the principle. I think. To get an accurate gauge of it would require effectively measuring out your lifespan, fixing it - Jeez. I mean, you’d know exactly when you’d die. How, too. No one wants that, right?”

“You don’t know that already?”

“Norn of the Past, that’s me. I run the backend maintenance. And Skuld, my sister who does that sort of stuff, has a pretty strict no-cut policy on life threads. She’s very modern, you know. Not very into prophetic string predetermination, says it ends up twisting events in a given life around for  _ irony _ , which is another thing she thinks should be minimized in a more contemporary, morally  _ neutral _ universe. Little weirdo doesn’t get it - divinities are moral beings by definition. Gods versus demons are manifested out of universal desires as expressed in neuromorphic complex systems, whether that’s a sentient nebula or regular carbohydrate-y stuff like you. Things have wills. Wants. Perceptions. We just have to knit all that stuff together into a coherent universe, and we have our own expressions of those big things, so you can’t make  _ peace _ with demons - the whole point of their existence is to be the id to our superego, to quote the Sigmeister…”

Urd trailed off. Ranma’s eyes had glazed over. She slapped him again.

“Ow ow ow owwwww! God  _ damn _ that manicure of yours is gonna cut my face open.”

“Did you just listen to anything I said?”

Ranma looked at her funny. “Uh, no? You were disappearing up your own ass the same way my dad does whenever he’s talking about the ‘good ol’ days’. So I figured, whatever, let the lady have her fun. It’s late. I need to sleep.”

“I was  _ explaining _ how difficult it is to fix your curse. Trying to puzzle out how it could be done. Be appreciative.”

“Yeth, Mithtreth,” Ranma lisped. “Igor thall do ath you athk.”

“Fuck off. You’ve never seen that movie. Point is, I’ll look into it. But don’t expect miracles, got it?”

“You’re a goddess, you use magic, you’re telling me-”

“Yuh-huh.” Urd leaned forward, grabbed Ranma’s untouched glass of fizzy water, chugged it in one go. It was pretty diluted by melted ice, but maybe Urd had a, you know, problem? Ranma didn’t really know.

“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry I can’t help you right now. But, in exchange for the stuff you’re contractually obligated to do for me anyway - I can help you. I  _ want _ to help you. So come on. Let’s talk fiances. That’s the other big problem in your life, right? As a moonlighting love goddess I  _ guarantee  _ I can help you with that.”

“You’ll just make it worse. Seriously. Everyone who says that-”

“Hey! Hey. I’m actually pretty good at this. I totally got this one wimpy-ass engineering student from a few years back hooked up with my sister. Also a goddess. So I think I know my way around the ways of love.”

(This, of course, was total bullshit.)

“Really?”

“Of course. I’ll have you hitched with your perfect match within a reasonable amount of time. I guarantee it.” She made a little ‘O’ shape with her pointer finger and thumb. Winked.

(This, also, was total bullshit.)

“Uh. Okay.” He had no way of believing the goddess, but hey, if she knew magic, maybe she could teleport him to, say, Hokkaido if everything went wrong. They had TV’s in Hokkaido, right? Of course they did. “You’re going to ask more questions, right?”

“You betcha!” Urd shouted, leaning forward hard enough to angle the table between them toward her. “So. You’ve got three fiances and one who doesn’t count. They all like you, or this an arranged thing?”

Ranma scratched his face. Thought of Ukyo and her smile when she tossed that heart shaped okonomiyaki when they’d met. Thought of Shampoo and the way she squeezed him, pressing her, erm, assets up against his chest hard enough to warp his ribcage. Okay. That was easy.

Akane - she was - erm. Dang. She had a nice smile, when they’d first met. 

“Want to be friends?” Yeah. He did. Fuck. He still did.

But she hadn’t talked to him for like two weeks after the wedding. And after that - it had been nothing but fights. He yelled, she yelled, she whipped out that energy mallet or whatever it was, harumphed, and walked away leaving him with another bump on his head and another - another grudge.

But when she smiled, she was so cute…

“I think so. Yeah. They all like me, I guess.”

“Even the Akane one?”   
“Oh. She’s-” he scratched the back of his head. “She’s just like that sometimes. Very nice girl, just occasionally hopelessly violent. I mean, that’s kinda true of Ucchan and Shampoo, too, so…”

The pause that Urd left before she responded, and the face she gave him - he coulda sworn he heard a goddamn laugh track somewhere in the background. But she recovered, back into that same grin.

“Alright. How long have things been - like this between you and these girls?”

“Uh, two or three years. Been six months since the wedding and it was like two years before then, so-”

“YOU HAD A WEDDING?!”

“Yeah, so?”

“Which one?”

“Akane.”

“The one who called you a pervert and a sleaze and-”

“Yes! She’s just like that sometimes! ‘Sides, the other girls wrecked the wedding anyway, so really it’s their fault-”

“Define wrecked.”

“Uh, bombed. Like, literally. Bombs.”

Again. That same what-the-fuck-did-I-just-drag-myself-into face.

“So really you’ve cut off all contact with those girls, so the only option is Shouty.”

“Oh! Uh, no. We still talk. Took a while. But you know, things kinda got back to normal.”

“Normal.”

“Yeah. Every so often some crazy dude with some thematically inappropriate martial art shows up, I pound him into the dirt, I do my homework, Hinako-Sensei threatens to drain my life energy if I don’t get better scores on my homework - Stop lookin’ at me like that!”

“So. You could have upended the status quo. Could have picked one. And you didn’t. Dude.”

“Yeah!” Ranma shouted, leaning forward, almost meeting her painted forehead. “I did what I had to do to keep the peace! I don’t like it anymore than you do, but if I picked one the other girls would kill  _ her _ and then they’d kill  _ me _ and then they’d kill  _ each other _ ! That’s how it is -  _ STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT! _ ”

Urd looked at him like that for a little longer. Blinked. “Dude. Pick one and  _ run _ .”

“Ukyo’s got ninjas, Shampoo’s got Chinese Amazons, Akane’s got my dad.”

“Okay. Keep telling yourself that there’s no way out. I get it. I like to live in the past, too. Kinda my job.” Her eyes narrowed.

“But - and you need to understand this, Ranma - sooner or later, the status quo is going to change. If these girls are all as psychotic as you say they are, why haven’t they just decided to kill each other off?”

“I-” Ranma stopped. “I’d know. I’d know and I’d hate them for it. They know that. I think.”

“So you’re relying on the fact that they all care for  _ you _ to preserve  _ them _ , even though you hate the way things are, and so do they. So you’ve all signed yourself into a do-nothing pact on pain of mutual annihilation, of which you are the lynchpin.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure.”

“Hild’s magnificent cleavage, Ranma. The Americans and the Soviets weren’t this unhinged. They wanted to  _ win _ , not just let the cold war drag on ad infinitum. So. You’ve gotta choose. Or-”

“Or what?”

“Convince them to share.”

“That’s a love goddesses’ advice? If it was that simple - they’d have killed each other already. Or they’d kill me first.”

“Okay, okay, fine. Come on, Ranma. This is what I’m good at. Have faith in me. We can solve this.”

“Mm.”

“How about this. I go and talk to these lovely ladies. Tomorrow’s a weekend. Shouldn’t be any problem doing that. And  _ I _ pick.”

“They’ll kill you!”

Urd grinned. “They can  _ try _ . They will fail. But when I pick - you go with it. And if they do go after you with all the wrath of women scorned - I shunt you to Asgard, you hide out for a month or two, I shunt you back when the trail’s gone cold. Easy peasy.” She looked downward. “Okay, that’s the plan. I solve this, you do some shit for me, you get a heroic reputation, easy ticket to Valhalla. No complaining.”

“I have  _ several _ complaints!”

“Well, then,” Urd said, reaching over to turn on the TV in the corner of the room, “We can discuss them later. For now, it’s getting late, so-”

Ranma looked at the television screen. It went from staticky to a blurry picture, like he was looking through glass blocks, of the Tendo Dojo, the giant sucking hole where her car had driven through and all.

“Uh, you’re not staying with me! Akane’ll lose her mind!”

“Don’t worry. I got a place. You, on the other hand - probably want to get back and sleep. So-” she hefted him up by the collar-

“Waitwaitwait-”

“Sayonara, Ranma-no-Casanova!”

And she tossed him through the TV in one motion.

* * *

**LATER**

“You see me now, a pimpman / of a hundred psychic hos…” Urd hummed the tune, butchered the lyrics, let her car autodrive itself through the silent streets of Shibuya, trying to sleep. “Been living on the edge so long / right into Kenny Loggins’ danger zooooooooooone…”

Okay, she didn’t exactly have a  _ place. _ Divinities usually had certain apartments in certain luxury establishments pre-reserved for field work, but Urd hadn’t had the time to reserve anything before bursting through the Tendo television. She was pretty sure the bitches in Requisitions were trying to stonewall her for some long-held grudge. Ugh. So, homelessness it was for now, ‘cause that old temple had been quietly demolished weeks after she and the rest of the goddesses had left. Pity that.

She felt her angel nip at the back of her mind - World of Elegance had been very well-behaved at that catastrophic meeting. She let her out. Let her speak.

_ You fear what you are about to do _

“Nah,” Urd said. “I just - how does shit this convoluted happen without our attention being drawn to it? A love hypercube like this reeks of demonic intervention - or, right, Jusenkyo. Probability field must’ve lined everything up like this. Poor little bastard.”

_ You threw him through a TV so i would agree _

“Look, it was either that, or listen to him moan about how helpless he was around those girls.”

_ You doubt him _

“Yeah. Sure. I don’t  _ know _ enough to make a judgement. Hence the interviews.”

_ And if none of them are pleasing _

“Then,” Urd grinned, “I’ll just have to help him find  _ real _ love, won’t I?”

_ Oh boy that will be fun _

“Eh, maybe. Here.” She reached down under her seat, felt for her little stash of angel treats. “For being such a good girl.”

World of Elegance looked at the little mint-chocolatey treat clasped in her Mistresses’ hand, dropped down, and popped it into her little mouth.

_ Yes _

“You like it? Ghirardelli premium, baby.”

_ The bittersweet of the chocolate and the sharp tang of the mint melt across my tongue and lo i know only bliss _

_ Thank you Mistress _

“All my guts are on the inside… de-de-de-doo-da-doo-do-da! I’m not sure if I still have a peepee…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, so this has gained viewers faster than just about anything else I've ever written on the internet. I guess it goes to show popularity really is rooted in what you write. You know what, fuck it, I'm gonna keep writing this thing.
> 
> Anyway, this was a less conceptually amusing chapter. The more I wrote it, the more I realized that yeah, Ranma has sort of put himself in a position where he wants to preserve the status quo ante above everything else, even his own happiness. So of course Urd had to call him out on that, even if the funny-factor wasn't always there.
> 
> Well, I'm sure I can make it more amusing next chapter - which, of course, involves Urd meeting Ranma's various brides-to-be. I'll see where the river takes me, so to speak.


	4. In which the Goddess makes a decision about what sort of people the hero needs in his life

**A DAY LATER**

“Skanks,” Urd said. “Buncha crazy skanks.”

Belldandy paused, sipped at her herbal tea. “That’s an awfully cruel thing to say, Urd. I’m sure they’re all just exhausted from being in love.”

“Bell, I love you, but no.” The eldest Norn flicked a bottle of sake over to her hand from across the little 6-mat apartment. It wasn’t much, but, again, she was on a budget. She missed the temple - and her spacious ‘Castle’ - painfully. “These girls - whew.”

Well, what the heck. At least her middle sister had come down from Asgard for a little emergency consulting, as kind and sweet as ever.

“What exactly makes you say that? To pass such judgements - it’s not wise of you.”

“Every single one of them attacked me within five minutes of meeting me,” Urd growled. “Every. Single. One. That’s not cool.”

“Well, they’ve had a lot of difficulty with magical beings, is what their files say. And you can be very tactless when meeting new people. It’s frightening to change the channel to something thematically appropriate before bursting out of a television. They need a kinder forewarning-”

“Sis. I went in through their front doors every time. And then the fourth one stalked me the whole time before ambushing me!”

“The one you stuffed in your trunk?”

“Yep. She came at the king. And she missed.”

“Well, she was afraid you were trying to steal Ranma from her, right?”

“Bell, come _on_. She referred to me - direct quote here - as a Cannibalistic Jungle Amazon from Darkest Peru. Girl before that thought I was Okinawan. Girl before that, a gyaru, whatever that is. And then this psychobitch called me - eh. I won’t say it.”

“Was it an - inappropriate word, sister? A Word of Power? A Blood Rune?”

“Starts with an ‘N’, rhymes with ‘congress’. I’ll say that much.”

Belldandy’s blue eyes, placid as a glacial lake, widened. “Oh my. That’s - quite something.”

“Yeah, and then she said she was gonna sic her clan’s ninjas on me before I tranq’d her. Wasn’t gonna take the risk of her doing that, so… yeah. She’s still in my trunk. Was gonna tv-port her somewhere nice. Cuba, maybe. Bet a girl like her would be plenty welcome in Cuba.”

“I see,” Belldandy said. “So she can take a beach vacation while you decide what to do with Ranma! How thoughtful!”

Urd twitched. “Yeah. Sure. We’ll go with that.”

She continued. “And the others weren’t much better. Akane? Basically Skuld but without the technowizardry and plus a tendency to beat up anything she feels sexually threatened by. So in denial of her love she’s turned it around into absolute loathing. Shampoo? Can’t speak his language, turns into a cat, which is the one thing he’s afraid of to the point that apparently he starts thinking _he’s_ a cat to cope or something stupid like that. Thinks of him as a mate as ordained by law of tribe and she’ll drag him back to the boonies of China to screw him silly for the rest of his life. Not happening. Ukyo - something’s off about her. Wants her childhood friend back to just hang out with. Too slow, you know? You don’t go from that to bombing the guy’s wedding so easily. So they’re all paranoid psychos who won’t give me the time of day because they think I’m in league with the other girls - which they’re all willing to kill instead of giving up on my guy - or they think I’m actually his mom-domme.”

Belldandy was silent. Sipped her tea. Urd could tell what she was thinking - were they _really_ that bad? Her middle sister never, ever wanted to believe that people could be so selfish. That all it took was a goddesses’ hard work to turn good intentions into good actions. And, okay, nine times out of ten Bell was able to find the purity in the souls of even the worst sort of people - murderers, pedophiles, Westboro Baptists, etc.

But one time out of ten, she’d run across a real scumbag, and then she would act shocked, _shocked_ that people could behave in such a manner. She would never show her anger - she would just smile. Say that she wasn’t mad, just disappointed, before leveraging first-class magic to render the offender into mincemeat. And then she’d hate herself for doing wicked, unforgiveable things, and Urd would calm her down, and they’d have a good cry - yeesh.

It was cute, but not really in line with her job right now. She didn’t need to prove to her sister that she was _right_ per se. Just that she was _capable_ . This was _her_ contract.

“Well, then, Urd. You just need to make sure he’s raised in a supportive environment full of responsible adults, right? Ensure that he feels loved and can love in turn,” Belldandy beamed. “Then, if he’s ready to be a true hero, he’ll come to things in his own time.”

“Oh, Almighty preserve us,” Urd groaned. “Domestic life’s even worse. His dad thinks raising him as a full-time kung-fu hobo, who wanders the world beating the shit out of other rando wandering kung-fu hobos.” She caught herself. “Not that that’s a bad thing. Useful for the whole ‘hero’ business if mortals were still all agrarian quasifeudalists. Gotta be mobile, travel takes time and resources. But times change.”

“How so?”

Urd let her chin rest in her hand. Looked out the tiny window of her one-room. Outside, Tokyo stretched on and on and on. “Whole country’s connected by shinkansen, now. Lind says urban density means you can have more ‘abnormal’ magic in a few square kilometers now than all of Ming Dynasty China in any given month. Wandering just doesn’t cut it, you know? What he needs is Batcave.”

“Ah! Like that movie with Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee -”

Urd shushed her. “That one _does not count_. Jim Carrey in anything other than slapstick comedy should be considered a heresy against the All-Father himself and punished thusly. If it were up to me, Joel Schumacher would have been blood-eagled years ago. But. Not the point. Point is - something like Batman - that’s a model! They both have an absent parent or two, they both wandered the world learning the ancient arts of war in their boyhoods - if I can just shape the kid into a playboy billionaire with his own mansion Genji-style-”

Belldandy had been sipping her tea. She was slurping it, now, draining the little cup fast as possible. Once she had put her cup down, she said, with an uncharacteristic amount of sternness, “That is a terrible idea, Urd.”

“Oh. How so.”

Belldandy sighed. “If Bruce Wayne were a real man - he would be a sick man. A man who cannot accept that his parents were taken from him. A man who cannot move on. Obsessed with hurting others, with breaking their bodies instead of finding the light in their hearts. Why, he could use his money to industrially revitalize Gotham City, but instead treats it as his Gothic playground, his villains as things he must simply injure and incapacitate instead of _heal_! He has no kindness in him, Urd, only hatred. Surely Ranma wouldn’t descend to such a level?”

Urd blinked. “Girl. It’s a comic book. Don’t think about it like _that_.”

“Like what?” Was it her, or was Belldandy - angry? That wasn’t good. Angry Belldandy had a tendency to erase civilizations from history on accident.

“Like, realistically. Not as a moral model for the universe. Just, y’know, something fun.”

Her sister sighed. “All stories are real on some level, Urd. You know that as well as I do. Otherwise, we goddesses simply wouldn’t exist. So please - every story you tell - think about who will be happy by the time it ends.”

Okay. _That_ was why she called Bell down from Asgard. No one else she knew could do Belldandy-isms, vague and yet weirdly sentimental, like the Norn of the Now.

But.

“Whatever. Batman’s just a metaphor at this point. My broader point is that his dad’s a piece of shit, and his dad-in-law’s not much better, and his fiances are unhinged. So I’d have to somehow introduce a responsible adult into his life as a role model. Damn.”

Urd thought. And thought. And then an idea came to her.

“Ha! I’ve got it! If Ranma needs a responsible adult, he can have _me_! I’m the eldest Norn, after all, not a lot of people with more responsibility than me!” Saying this, she hefted a nearby sake bottle and chugged half its contents in one go. “I’ll rent a bigger apartment, get the kid a non-bat-man-cave, provide him with wholesome maternal love and care… Yeah. See, this is why I keep you around, Bell. To help me think up shit like this.”

Belldandy cocked her head to the side. “That sounds like kidnapping, in all honesty.”

“Well, is it kidnapping if in _not_ doing it, you’re being a neglectful Hot Fairy Godmother?”

“I hardly think things are that desperate from what you’ve told me about him.”

“Bell. The kid’s dad dropped him in a pit full of feral cats wrapped in fish sausage when she was like eight. I think we passed the point of desperation somewhere between that and selling him off to like twenty different dads for marriage in the span of eighteen.”

“Ah. That is - true. But his mother seemed like a perfectly kind person! Being able to forgive his curse - even if he swore to her that seppuku pact-”

“Point. Point. Okay, but consider this: that katana-wielding cougar married his dad and then cut them loose with her only son to wander the world being forced into a continuous chain of childhood traumas for the sake of martial excellence. Worked, sure, in a very narrow definition of making a functional kid. So she was, ah, what’s the English word?”

“In Cahoots?”

“Cahoots. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like Iran-Contra. If you _really_ didn’t recall, then you must be stupid bordering on senile, and the best thing for you is to get chucked into the big retirement home in the sky before you piss your pants on public television. Either that, or you’re a bold-faced fat fucking liar.”

Belldandy swallowed her tea, doing her best not to spit it out. “I think that simile got a little away from you, sister dearest.”

“Feh. Yeah. Whatev. Point is, I don’t trust that stab-happy harpy any more to raise a teenager any more than I trust the man-panda. But if I get extract him from his present solution at home - maybe allow him to still go to school and keep his acquaintances at a distance - then I can really do the work my contract demands I do. Make a real _hero_ out of him.”

Belldandy had this funny look in her eyes. “I suppose, if that’s really the function of your contract - but if Ranma’s happiness is not considered, or at least you do not convince others around him that your abduction is for the best - you will make enemies of many people.”

“So?”

“So please at least try to convince his mother that there is no reason to go after him. I will help you in any way I can in fulfilling this contract, sister dearest, but you must do that, at least. To act without thinking - it is at once your greatest strength and your greatest weakness.”

“Ugh. You know me too well,” Urd groused. “Fine. I’ve been checking out the mom a bit. She, uh, she’s a teacher of all things. Vice Principal, actually. Carries that katana everywhere. Y’know what, fuck it, we’ll get her now.” She grabbed the remote, turned her little TV on, focused on Nodoka’s home in Minato-ku - found the connection, the wire networks so many steps on a pathway through non-Euclidean space. “Wanna come with?”

Belldandy nibbled at a cookie. “Shouldn’t you let poor Kodachi out of your car first? She must be going mad in there.

“Eh. We’ll swing back and get her on the way. I’d have to bring her inside to tv-port her. Really would rather drag a blackbagged megacorp heiress into my little apartment at _night_ , thanks.”

* * *

**ONE TV-PORT LATER, Minato Juuban**

Nodoka Saotome thought about the proposal the strange woman who had interrupted her T-Drama viewing just moments ago had put forward. A goddess, apparently. Dressed in a nice formal kimono, yes, but she clearly wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. She had described Ranma’s situation in extensive detail, yes, but she had paid particular attention to one girl whose name she _swore_ she knew, perhaps one of her students, ranting about she’d called her a word which rhymed with ‘express’, which she apparently _wasn’t_ \- well. Hardly a blushing model of Japanese womanhood. But then again, so few girls were these days.

Ah, but her sister! How wonderful she was! She had immediately offered to clean up her little TV dinner and fix her something nice over in the kitchen, had brought in after-dinner sweets Nodoka didn’t even know she had. As she nibbled at natto, she couldn’t help but wonder - why couldn’t more girls be like that these days? The sort of woman she had been when she won her husband’s heart, and sent her little son off to become a true warrior…

She sighed. Had that been a mistake? She was unsure. The curse, yes - but the way of a true defender of chivalry was necessarily fraught with peril. In a way, Genma had been at once the best and the worst trainer of her child she could have conceived of.

“Well?” The elder goddess snapped her fingers a meter or so away from Nodoka’s face. “You ready to make your son into a man among men?”

“I - you can do that?”  
“Of course! Whole point of the deal, right?” Urd smirked. “I mean, you can still visit him every once in awhile-”

“Why not just have him come live with me? I appreciate the offer, Miss Urd, and I understand that you are at least dedicated to the _concept_ of Ranma as a heroic figure, but one gets awfully lonely out here.” She sighed. “He has not come to see me ever since the wedding bombing. From what little I know of him, I wonder if he is afraid I am angry…”

Urd grimaced inside. She had _not_ anticipated this. Hadn’t the lady basically kicked her kid out into the wild blue yonder with out so much as an imperative to write once in awhile? With that bamboo-munching bastard no less? Mortal minds were strange, especially this latest batch she’d have to deal with…

“Ah!” Belldandy piped up. “It’s good to see that you care _so much_ for Ranma.” Her placid smile unchanging, she continued. “What prompted this change of heart?”

Urd’s neck swiveled to look at her little sis. Had she - had she just _burned_ Ranma’s mom? Dayum. She’d thought Bell had been more laid-back than ever after getting hitched with Keiichi, but wow. Brutal.

Nodoka seemed to flinch, just a little. “Exactly what do you mean by that?”

“Well - I intend to bear children with my partner soon, too. So I’ve been talking to my mother about such things, and we’re of the opinion that really, a soft, gentle touch is needed. And - this is the saddest thing, because there are so many mothers out there who just can’t provide that without some help.”

“Ranma is a _martial artist_ , is he not?” Nodoka’s mind was steadily going from ‘diplomacy mode’ to ‘battle stations.” Inside her brain, insults were being loaded, armor was being mounted, denials refuelled. “He has lasted this long, has he not?”

Okay. Urd wasn’t really sure where she fit in with the verbal catfight going on here. Might as well be the bad cop to Bell’s good cop. “Sure has! You’ve let Genma run the whole show with your only son and look where it’s gotten him! Bombed-out weddings! A hapless tomboy with anger management issues that make Cu Chullain look like Balder! He dropped the kid in a pit full of feral cats for ‘training’-”

Nodoka, her posture unchanged, spat high-pressure green tea all over the place. Wiped herself off. Swallowed. Tried to recover the conversation’s dignity. “He what.”

“Ah.” _That_ was the ticket. “Hubby never told you, eh?” Urd leaned in, smug as could be. “Never told you about the cats. Figures.”

“What about the cats?”

Urd told her. Left nothing out. Watched as Nodoka’s already wide eyes widened to the approximate size of dinner plates. Watched as her hands began to shake. Belldandy, for her part, looked a little annoyed, but what-ever. This was, as Skuld would say, the premium memeium.

“I see,” Nodoka choked out. “I - I have made an egregious mistake in my choice of husband, it seems. Please forgive me. Ranma must be removed from his grasp entirely.”

“I just am so surprised that Ranma never told you,” Belldandy said. “He must be very embarrassed about -”

“Oh, of _course_ he’s _embarrassed_ ,” Nodoka said, her voice steadily dropping, her eyes glazed over. “To have such a weakness - it will bring dishonor down upon the entire clan. I - I took a risk, you understand, marrying Genma. I had hoped to bring unorthodox talent into my bloodline in order to strengthen our future fortunes. I had hoped the wild horse could be tamed by good Confucian values. I am a complete idiot.”

Urd looked around. She had this weird craving for popcorn right now but knew better than to ask for any.

“I - am I unworthy of raising a child? The fruit of my womb? He must hate me. Of course he would. To not bring that soft touch to my little baby boy-”

“Oh no!” Belldandy chirped. “I’m sure Ranma loves you. And he’ll love you even _more_ if you leave him in our care. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and Urd is quite good with the soft touch in many senses of the word.”

“Hey now…” Urd’s gaze flicked over to her sister, then back to Nodoka. Dang. What stage of grief was she at? She could never remember them - Id? Ego? Superego? Partypooperego? No. Wait. Shit. That didn’t count.

“Very well then!” Nodoka shouted suddenly, slamming her hands on the table, her teacup bouncing and unceremoniously falling onto the floor. “If that four-eyed fatso thinks he can send my bloodline on the road to roninhood, _he’s got another thing coming!_ If you goddesses can make Ranma a hero for our times - a symbol of Japanese manhood in this post-economic-bubble hellscape of a city - _then I will do what I can to guide him as well!_ If you believe he needs independence from his mommy dearest to truly flourish - then I’ll just have to make you _provide weekly progress reports!_ ”

Saying this, she stood up and brandished her katana - unsheathed, not that that made Urd feel any better - with ferocity that would have made even Tatewaki Kuno quiver just a bit. “Listen well!” she barked. Urd could have sworn some sort of fancy-ass Ukiyo-e - crashing waves, thunderbolts, all that - had manifested behind her - was this the Saotome School’s battle aura.

“You two shall be Ramna’s babysitters - _for now_ ! If you do not satisfy my requirements for a truly manly man, then divinity or not this blade shall strike you down with all the strength my ancestors can provide me! But - _but_! If you can tame the wild horse, shape his blade into the shape of thousand-folded steel-”

“That sounds kinda painful honestly-” Urd quipped.

“SILENCE! CEASE YOUR QUIPPING, YOU TANNED TRANSGRESSOR! LET ME FINISH MY MONOLOGUE! IT WAS JUST GETTING GOOD!”

“Okay.” Urd gulped.

“Yes,” Nodoka gushed, “If you can make him what I desire, then I - _THE UNWAVERING WIND OF TOMOBIKI PRIVATE HIGH SCHOOL!_ \- shall accept you as my divine patrons, and erect a Torii in your honor over Ise Shrine itself!”

“Ah, how kind of you, Miss Nodoka, but we don’t really need such things,” Belldandy said. “We goddesses have no need of public worship icons, especially since we are most pointedly _not_ Kami.”

“Yeah,” Urd said, “I mean, we’d honestly rather Ama-rama not feel like we’re edging in on her turf.”

Nodoka glared lasers at her. No, not daggers. This was more a lasers vibe for sure.

“Of course we’d be more than happy to accept any form of honor you deem suitable!” she squeaked. “Uh, I’ll email you weekly reports if he’s not in the field, we’ll definitely make this work _for sure_. But, if you don’t mind me asking, uh, what was the Unwavering Wind bit about?”

“Ah! That was my official title at my high school kendo club! I was the captain, of course. They called me other things in private, but in public, they knew I was unstoppable.”

“How wonderful!” Belldandy chirped. “Well, then, oh my! Look at the time! I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything!”

“Oh no!” Nodoka cooed, switching from _shonen_ to _shoujo_ in the span of about three seconds. “I’m so glad you came! Really helped to liven up this poor old woman’s life. Um, the back door is that way, or you could just leave through the television, if that’s your preferred method of transportation.”

“Sure is!” Urd said. “Uh, thanks for letting me go through with this! See ya in a bit! Uh, so long ran-mom!”

She jetted across the room and into the TV. Belldandy turned to follow her, then stopped as the screen stopped rippling and stiffened into glass again. “Ah, Urd! I’m sorry Miss Saotome, but - I move via mirrors. May I please use your washroom?”

“Of course, of course. Do the divine - you know - do they have movements as we humans do? I’ve always been curious…”

Belldandy flushed a deep red. “Ah- I- Please excuse me for a moment!”

And she rushed out of the room.

Nodoka sighed. Took in everything that had just happened. Tried to process this - _passion_ she felt for being a Mom among Moms. Perhaps - perhaps it was time to relive the old ways.

She got up, turned, and went to fetch her old Fist of the North Star VHS, humming her old battle theme from those tournaments so long ago…

* * *

**In the garage near Urd’s pad**

Her pink Cadillac stood out, among the white and grey Hondas and Subarus and other dull-as-dirt rice-burners. That was the point, of course. Lind had kept forwarding her email about changes to administrative policy which would ‘place more emphasis on covert operations in high-media coverage areas’, which was Lind-speak for ‘make sure no goddess ever gets a chance to have fun because I sure as hell don’t’. She had asked Lind what she did for fun, once. She, uh, polished her armory. Took maintenance of her transconceptual weaponry, from her halbred to the guns that didn’t have proper Midgard names _yet_ , very seriously.

She beeped the trunk as she strolled towards her car. Tried not to think that she was probably going to have to send weekly progress reports to that slip of a madwoman. Not because she feared the Saotome matriarch’s wrath, but because Belldandy would be watching very intently when she wasn’t doing her job up in Asgard, and she would be not mad, but very disappointed in her beloved older half-sister, if such a thing were to happen. Ugh. Whatta day.

“Well,” she muttered to herself, “At least I’ve got you under wraps, you leotard-wearing lunatic, so-”

She popped the trunk. Did a double take.

Black rose petals. Real ones, spilling out of the trunk. A black rose with a note in scribbled kana wrapped around it. Impossibly tiny text, reading:

_So! You think you have bested me, you-_

She tried her best not to read the following word-

_But as it happens I have friends in, let us say, low places! Infernal places, in fact!_

_Yes, that’s right, you mocha-skinned maniac! With the help of my very best friend, and the other harridans you intend to keep Ranma from loving as such a man surely must - you shall be struck down! Rendered so much dust in the wind, which will then, pardon my Trotskyist metaphor, dumped into the dustbin of history! And as your microparticles drift off into the cosmic ether, know this: Whether in love or in war, the Black Rose_ always _takes the dominant position! OHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!_

And then. In even _tinier_ handwriting.

 _P.S.: Mara here! Your mom says she’s looking forward to watching you fuck this contract of yours bad. Don’t worry, you can_ always _renounce your stupid butthead dad and come back to my waiting arms and ample bosom, where we can finally unite under the Elysian Fields as it was meant to be - DEMON AND DEMON, TOGETHER AT LAST. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAawfuck i ran out of room one sec_

Smaller handwriting. Microscopic, practically:

_-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!_

_Love, Mara XOXOXOXOXO_

_PPS: Mistress Hild says the boy is hers~_

Urd processed all of that for about five seconds.

Then, she grabbed the rose, tag and all, and tossed it a good distance away, seconds before the timed explosive embedded inside it detonated and set off every car alarm in the garage.

She did not hear the simultaneous howling of a hundred automobiles. She thought.

After several minutes of mental gymnastics, she finally said to herself:

“Son of a _bitch_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took a bit more time to write because it was originally going to be much different: The first of Urd's interviews with the ladies of the Ranma cast, before she came to the conclusion that they were all unworthy of her charge's love. Shampoo, Ukyo, then Akane. It was amusing enough, but for now I want to just push the plot along as best as I can, and get back to those interviews at a later date. I mean, this chapter really wrote itself once I had an idea of what I wanted to do with it - and those just didn't.
> 
> Hell, I wasn't even originally planning on estranging the Ranma fiancees from Ranma himself, but someone in the 'they're all awful' camp on Sufficient Velocity got me to thinking. Most of my better ideas for arcs in this story are more on the AMG! side of things - I dunno, it's hard for me to think of original gags for a Ranma-oriented fic. I've gotten so invested in various breeds of fanon with these characters that I can't help but render everything kind of melodramatically, but with AMG I feel like there's more room for blatant parodic flanderization, you know?
> 
> Like, take Nodoka. Is she as awful as Genma is - complicit in his man-among-men bullshit - or is she the sensible straightwoman who just wants her son to be a functioning adult and not another kung-fu hobo? Some fics (What Do You Want) say one - others (Chaos Factor, which is by far my favorite Ranma fic) say another. I tried to thread the needle by making her eccentric, as all Ranma characters should be, but not actively accepting of all of Genma's bullshit the more she learns about it. So, uh, hopefully she gets to see some action.
> 
> Let me assure you, though, I don't want to write out the old Ranma girls nor render them absolute antagonists. I'm sort of writing this thing headfirst, stringing together various plot ideas with blind fervor and trying to maintain a fairly screwball tone. Perhaps I'll ease up, let things get a bit more shonen-slugfest-y or rom-com-y. Eventually.
> 
> Next time - you know what, I'm gonna do these like the 'next episode' slugs from the anime. Put on your best Noriko Hidaka voice:
> 
> Kodachi Kuno, the Black Rose, is back - and she's called us girls together for a meeting! Teaming up with a demoness seems pretty sketchy - but I can't let that goddess spirit Ranma out of our lives! We'll have to put aside our differences and fight for the love we all share, even if that means doing the work of the infernal realm! And - what's this? EHHH?! A familiar face returns from college, and she has her own plans to share! Kasumi - who can I trust anymore? My heart beats with an unfamiliar rhythm...
> 
> Next Episode! The Ranma Liberation Front suits up for war - for love - and for justice! 'In which Antagonistic Forces conspire against the goddess and our hero!', or something like that! Look forward to it, only on AO3 and Sufficient Velocity!
> 
> Ahhhhhh, this goth-loli stuff makes me look like a pervert...


	5. In which Antagonistic Forces conspire against the Goddess and her Hero

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song in the middle belongs, of course, to N.W.A. and company. You'll know the one. (I originally had the song be 'X gon give it to ya' but that came out in 2003, and as I must remind you all it is 1996.)

**Castle Kuno, Level B4**

**Executive Decision Making Center OF WOE**

Akane Tendo was not enjoying herself. Not in the least.

The invitation had been delivered by Sasuke publicly. Like, he’d just walked up to her, given her the letter, appended the delivery with a ‘please don’t kick me’ and walked over to Ukyo to give her the same one, with the same ‘please don’t kick me’, delivered in the exact same tone. No ninja bullshit. Which, in her opinion, was probably a bad sign.

It had taken her a good twenty minutes with a kanji dictionary to decipher the flowery language - and even flowerier font - the letter used, and it said:

_ My Dearest Tendo Akane, _

_ As you are doubtlessly aware, yesterday a strange woman proclaiming to be a goddess ‘interviewed’ yourself and the other ‘official’ contenders for Ranma-sama’s love. I was in the neighborhood at the time, and my spies informed me that she had come bearing false promises of reconciliation and ‘wanting what is best for Ranma’. Of course, as soon as she endeavored to return to her coven - I had no doubt that she was a witch of the Yawateba tribe of Peru, having freshly applied her betwixing glamours fueled by cannibalism of the kidneys of civilized peoples - as such people are wont to do - I politely approached her and attempted to dissuade her from harming a single hair on the head of my beloved Ranma-sama. Of course, my boundless charm and saint-like grace so infuriated her witchy heart that she attacked me at once! _

_ Ah, yes, I knew that you and the others had been defeated by her previously, but there is a reason why you are burakumin prostitutes all and I, the Black Rose of Saint Hebreke, am a woman of the highest caste, in great favor with the emperor and the beneficent power he commands - so I sought to defend myself using the humble tools of Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics, as a woman must. _

_ Alas! Using her black majycks, she got the better of me, bound me with my own ribbon, and stuffed me in the back of her automotive vehicle. For hours I lay alone, unloved, unwanted, unable to escape. Such irony - the exotic materials which make my ribbon nigh-indestructible rendered my usual methods of escaping bondage useless! _

_ But! Like a heroine in a Taisho-period film serial, my story was not yet finished. Why, no sooner had I given up hope than a mysterious kind-hearted stranger opened the trunk and liberated me from captivity. She - although this person does resemble a bifauxnen male, somewhat like a certain Osakan garbage peddler, they insist they are female - was an ancient enemy of the so-called goddess, who had been battling her for the fate of lovers everywhere since time immemorial. How incredible, said I! Oh, but it is no lie, said she. Why, there was this one time when we- _

Two fucking pages of unannotated dialogue later, she got back on topic.

_ -and when she regained consciousness, the friar’s wife’s prosthetic liver was nowhere to be found! OH HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO! Such japery, such wit - I knew at once that we were allies. _

_ Now, I invite you all to Castle Kuno in a display of my magnificent generosity and Buddha-like mercy. For, you see, this spiritual figure has requested that we - which is to say myself and all of you peasants - unite under her command to take back Ranma-sama. No doubt, Tendo Akane, once you crawled out of your bath-salt-induced stupor this morning, you were dimly aware that your mate, who you spend day and night attempting to rut with, was removed from the premises of the Tendo Dojo. Perhaps, piecing monosyllabic particles together like a child connecting cars on a toy train, you were able to read the note the goddess left informing us all: SHE! IS! HIS! _

_ This must not stand, of course. I have leveraged the considerable financial and military assets of Clan Kuno, despite the rejoicing of my cretinous brother and his attempt to override my ruling - where would his joy be if the red-haired witch who is no doubt this new creature’s scout and consort were to cease to plague this great nation, I wonder? - and although I have been unable to declare a Code Red within the JSDF command hierarchy, they have allowed my assets to make use of certain spy vehicles the clan’s industrial branches rent out to the Americans at Yokosuka. But I do not need your help finding Ranma-sama - I need your help saving him! _

_ Yes, for this witch goddess from the depths of chthonian jungles doubtless can render any military hardware I am able to provide worthless, utterly worthless. And I know that, for all my capabilities, I am no match for her tete-a-tete. _

_ But my new companion believes that, with our powers combined, amplified by her knowledge of wholesome empowering magic, we might be able to stand a fighting chance, as surely as many dinosaur robots are useless against a large man in a rubber monster suit, but combined they can form a Zordicron or a Voltonator or whatever tokusatsu pap NHK has the gall to put on the airwaves these days, and in doing so defeat their enemy - ah, but I am rambling. _

_ To put it in words a Tendo would understand: Slut-witch bad. Me good. Me help. We help. We hurt slut-witch bad with big punch. Many excite! _

_ Goodness, I bring myself to your level for a moment and I feel as though I’m a heroin-addicted quadripeligic VHS bootlegger dying of gangrene somewhere in old Kowloon. That aside, you will come to Castle Kuno after school today, enter by the servant’s entrance, and be guided by Sasuke to the elevator, whereupon you will go to floor 4B, where my father’s unused Executive Decision Making Center is located. Under no circumstances will you go to any other floor, or open any other door other on floor 4B. It would be quite irritating to myself and the staff if we had to clean what was left of you off of, how shall I put it, my private projects. _

_ Once we convene I shall explain more, as necessary, then we shall strike as soon as I have acquired the location of my Dearest. Attempt to intervene after the defeat of the god-witch, and, again, it would be quite irritating if I were to have to deal with you in public. But, if you’re polite and cooperative and do not attempt to interdict between me and Ranma-sama - well, who knows what would be possible then? Once the wedding is held, I might even permit you to be my chambermaids! Tendo Akane, consider the career possibilities you might have as an indentured servant to Clan Kuno; it would certainly be far more fulfilling than dying alone and unloved in that shack you call a dojo, with no pupils to continue that humdrum drivel you call a martial art! To scrub my personal toilets of my feminine discharges would doubtless be the role you are most suited to in life. _

_ Ah, but here I am being so generous, I threaten to stain this paper with the tears of my love! You understand what must be done, so scurry those stubby little legs and plump tush of yours over to my estate posthaste. If you’re quick, I’ll even serve you a feast of servant’s remains! OHHHH HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOOOOOOOOOO well then now that we’re done what you’re still recording even this well turn that bedeviling typewriter off this instant before I shove _

_ LOVE, KODACHI KUNO _

_ RIGHTFUL HEIR TO CLAN KUNO (NOT THAT MY DELUDED BROTHER NEEDS TO KNOW THAT) _

And it was signed with a black lipstick kiss and a rose signet next to it.

Akane then went through about ten minutes of planning exactly  _ how _ to kill Kodachi the next time she had the lady-balls to step outside her castle. Drop from above and snap her neck, or rent a car and do a hit-and-run, or hire some local Yakuza to-

But no. One, she wasn’t even close to the same level of martial arts skill as Kodachi. She was getting better. But still. Not even close.

Two, the bitch was right, because she  _ had _ gotten a note that morning left on the refrigerator, written in a loopy, almost  _ flirty _ handwriting:

_ ‘Sup Tendos, _

_ Remember me? Urd? The one your dad tried to bite the head off of with that stupid technique of his? Well, you’ve probably noticed that Ranma’s gone, and he’s gonna be gone for awhile. _

_ Look, it’s nothing personal. Well, okay, it kinda is. Attacking a patron goddess of your supposed son-in-law to be just ain’t done, you know? No matter if I look like some karate-kicking Okinawan bimbo you had the audacity to bang X number of years ago. Let the fact that I politely removed Ranma from his room without waking anyone up be proof that, yes, I am a goddess. _

_ Anyhoo! I’ve decided, and the lovely Miss Nodoka has agreed, that the best thing to do for Ranma is to just remove him from the chaos that currently is his life right now. At first I thought, maybe he could still go to the same school as before! And then I discovered that said school is run by a man with a tree on his head. _

_ He needs hero training, as per the contract his father signed, and I know just the people to provide it. _

_ So: where is he? That’s for me to know and you to not bother to find out! When will he be back? That’s an if, not a when! Not even Nodoka knows, so don’t go marching over to her house and try to do whatever passes for intimidation with you guys. Otherwise I’ll call in a Valkyrie blue-ops squad to skystrike your neighborhood. Well, what should you do? Nothing! Let it be. Think of this as an improvement on your present life - if Ranma comes back, he’s gonna be a badass beyond compare, and you won’t have to lift a finger to make it so. And if he’s not, maybe hook lil’ Akane up with someone who she doesn’t think is a perverted sleaze? Maybe - and this is just off the top of my head - a non gender-swapping girl! _

_ Oh, but look at the time! I just remembered Dragon Ballz is on, and they’re just about to finish up the latest arc! Me and Ranma gotta plop our butts in front of my MASSIVE television and watch some heroics in DIVINE high-definition. Gonna see what kinda liquor the boy likes, too. We’ll start with a little bit of champagne and work our way up to hand sanitizer. It’ll be fun. _

_ Ta Ta! _

_ -Urd, Norn of the Then _

_ Goddess Second Class Limited License _

Long story short, Kasumi had stopped her before she punched craters in the fridge, she’d managed to go to school and only snapped a few dozen pencils over the course of the day, and 

oh  _ boy _ was that  _ bitch _ in for it.

Yeah, she thought as she rode the elevator down into the bowels of the Kuno estate, the elevator music a screechy opera distorted by strange backwards speech, she could put up with Pretentious McAnnoyingLaugh for a few hours if it meant getting her hands on some real weapons. Then she’d go find Ranma, wipe the floor with that so-called goddess, and then - then what?

Well, she’d - she’d - she’d give that pervert a piece of her mind! How  _ dare _ that transvestite twerp go off with some older woman and have her babies and - and - how dare he - he -

She blushed. Full-body. Clenched her hands into fists. Shook, shook, shook.

How dare he just  _ leave _ her all alone!

The doors opened into darkness. She stomped out of the elevator - the screechy garbled opera music was sorta freaky, still blasting at full volume through the obsidian-black hallway, but she’d dealt with more annoying things before, like Kodachi herself - then came to a pair of massive double doors labelled:

**Kuno Clan Executive Decision Making Center**

A second brass plate had been recently installed below it:

**OF WOE**

Akane rolled her eyes and casually kicked the door open, then stormed in.

Yep. Ukyo and Shampoo on two sides of a long obsidian conference table - and Kodachi in some sort of dress that was three parts fishnets and one part black silk, legs on the table, kicking back in a chair cut of the same black stone, so monolithic Akane could only really call it a throne. The Black Rose grinned as she entered, her face angled and leering.

“Why, Akane! I thought you’d given up on Ranma-sama for a moment there! Please, simply take a seat on the far end.”

Akane looked at the three-legged stool before her. It barely had enough room to sit on at all, and was made from the same light-absorbing stone as Kodachi’s big ol’ throne. She tapped it. It wobbled like it was an animal about to die a horrible death on a nature documentary.

“I think I’ll stand,” the youngest Tendo said at last.

“Really!” Kodachi squealed. “Marvellous - a bit of fighting spirit in this common rice-planter! I shall enjoy bending and breaking you oh-so-thoroughly.” She hefted a glass of blood red wine from her side, took a long sip. “Wondrous.”

Akane rolled her eyes again. “Man. When did you start the supervillainess routine? I thought you were a blossoming flower of Japanese Womanhood or something equally stupid.”

Kodachi giggled. “Oh, I still am such a creature. As if you could understand my class act.”

“An act? Yeah. It’s an act alright,” Ukyo Kuonji muttered.

“Oh goodness. Resistance from my newfound friends. Whatever shall I do? Do you not understand that in a just universe - say, one of those otome games - I would be the eugenically superior heroine who, with her feminine charm and immeasurable resources, crushes her savage rivals in games of wit and strategy with the fate of entire kingdoms, nay, empires hanging in the balance? But with a kind enough heart to raise, nay, cultivate, a simple boorish martial artist into something far more, something virile and unstoppable? That we might rule all this fantasy world together? Ah, but it is not a just world we live in. As evidenced by my Ranma-sama being snatched away from my infinitely ample bosom.”

Xian Pu, legendary warrior of the Chinese Amazons, smirked. “Shampoo bigger. No contest. I see you taitai? They teeny. Akane Tendo teeny.”

It was like someone flicked a switch in the back of Kodachi’s mind. “Silence, you dog-eating dimwit! Your only hope of recovering your so-called ‘Airen’ is through my grace! You come to my house, you enter my grounds, you respect my authority!”

“Oh kami preserve us,” Ukyo drawled, dragging her Kansai accent out past her lips. “You two should just get a room and be done with it. Quit comparing your tits and get on with it.”

“O-ho? Spatula Girl jelly-belly because is act like man, think like man, have man-taitais? And so never have chance for real date with Airen?”

The okonomiyaki chef was unmoved. “All I’m sayin’ is that if nutty ol’ Kodachi really can leverage armies n’ whatnot to find Ranchan, an’ we’re all ess-oh-ell finding him on our own, ‘cause the minute we do something like that the gyaru-god calls in her lady friends to wreck our shit even harder than  _ she _ wrecked our shit, then we go with nutty ol’ Kodachi for now. Deal with our mutual rivalry once the poor boy’s out of her slutty clutches, ‘cause we need intel, and we need weapons.”

Kodachi beamed. “Splendid! The transvestite understands what is at stake! Now, then!” She sipped her wine - wasn’t she underage anyway - and revealed a remote in her other hand. “If you would kindly turn your attention to the Kunosoft EmpowerPoint I have set up on the projector screen above me.”

A few presses of some buttons. The screen flickered to life, with all sorts of cool 3D CG objects colliding about to form a hideous looking logo that I dare not describe because most viewers would label it ‘vaporwave-y’, and they would be right. (Alas! It was 1996!) Then the whole thing melted away into an even more hideous-looking page of sorts, which would, to wiser audiences, resemble a gif-saturated Geocities page. The title card read:

**I LIED.**

Then:

**EVEN AS A TACTICAL TEAM - AKANE AS BAIT, UKYO AND SHAMPOO AS MEAT SHIELDS, AND MYSELF AS UNWAVERING COMMAND AND DPS - WE STAND NO CHANCE AGAINST EVEN A SECOND-CLASS GODDESS.**

Shampoo slammed her palms against the table hard enough to crack the stone. “THEN WHY STUPID FLOWER GIRL BRING HERE?! SHAMPOO HAS MANY JOB NEEDS DOING!”

Kodachi grinned even wider, as if that was possible. “Well, I assume you all think I assembled you here as a trap to eliminate you, but alas! Such a thing would shatter Ranma-sama’s delicate heart such that even I could not heal him. No, I brought you here because I wanted you all to meet my new friend. Or rather - she wanted to meet you.”

The screechy opera music stopped. The only sound was the flowing of water, roaring like an ocean around them. Akane gulped.

Then Kodachi pressed another button on her remote, and the door behind her throne - until then shrouded in darkness - swung open.

New music began to play. English. Loud.

_ “YOU ARE ABOUT TO WITNESS THE STRENGTH OF STREET KNOWLEDGE! _

Rap.

_ “STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, CRAZY MOTHAFUCKA NAMED ICE CUBE!” _

Akane boggled as, from the door, emerged a solitary figure with long blond hair, strange red markings on her face, dressed mostly in leather and chains. Oh, she realized. This - had to be that person who had rescued Kodachi…

_ “FROM THE BAND CALLED NIGGAZ WID ADDITUDEZ!” _

The person - it really was a woman? But ‘she’ had such a mannish face - advanced. She was, Akane realized, wearing dark sunglasses in a room where one could barely see the walls.

Oh, and she was  _ singing _ .

_ “WHEN I’M CALLED OFF, I GOTTA SAWED-OFF!” _

Her voice was deep. Hoarse. Also, it was jumping between octaves incessantly. This  _ whoever  _ couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket even if the bucket was spot-welded to their skin and sealed with Gorilla Glue. They were trying, though. A for effort.

_ “SQUEEZE THE TRIGGER, AND BODIES ARE HAULED-OFF! YOU TOO, BOY, IF YOU FUCK WID ME-” _

Shampoo covered her ears as the woman ( _ fine _ ) danced around Kodachi’s throne, her moves about as slick as John Travolta, not in  _ Grease _ , but in  _ Pulp Fiction _ . The Black Rose, for her part, looked closer to spiritual oblivion than Akane had ever seen her, her eyes half-lidded in an utterly non-seductive way.

_ “THE POLICE - ARE GONNA HAVE TA COME AN’ GET ME! OFF YO’ ASS, THAT’S HOW I’M GOIN’ OUT! FOR THE PUNK MOTHAFUCKAS THAT’S SHOWIN’ OUT!” _

“Meh,” Ukyo said to herself. “Where’s Biggie when you need him?”

“Shampoo is more Tupac girl, personally, but at this point anything better!”

_ “NIGGAZ START TO MUMBLE! THEY WANNA RUMBLE! MIX EM’ AND COOK EM’ IN A POT LIKE-” _

At that point Kodachi pressed another button on her little remote and the music cut out. The incredibly mannish-looking woman stopped short. “-gumboooooooo.”

“Yes yes yes, that was quite impressive,” Kodachi deadpanned. “I would have gone for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, but they might not know that one. People say I have something of an old-music soul, though.”

The woman whipped off her sunglasses to reveal eyes the same color as her markings rolling in their sockets. “You all have no sense of fun. Here I am, trying to make an impression on these nubile young vict- I mean  _ ladies _ , and you go and  _ shit all over it _ .”

“Yes,” Kodachi coughed. “Well. Why not introduce yourself formally? Please to meet you, hope you can guess my name, and all that.”

“Fine, Fine.” The woman made a move that would have looked badass with a cloak on, the garment wrapping then unwrapping around her, but without such a thing made no sense.

“I am Mara. Demoness First Class. Unlimited License.”

“Mara?!” Akane gasped. “A-as in the Bhuddist incarnation of ultimate evil, of perverted passions that chain good souls to the pain of eternal recurrence?”

Shampoo looked at Akane. “Whooda-whooda you say what now?”

Akane pointed at the demoness and shouted, “She’s the ultimate incarnation of evil in Bhuddist theology! Kasumi told me all about her! And she’s a raging pervert!” She pointed at Kodachi in turn. “You - just what are you up to?! Trying to sell our souls to hell, is that it?!”

Kodachi was unmoved. “Well, not necessarily your  _ souls _ per se. Mara - I believe it is your turn to explain to this brute exactly the nature of the divine and infernal, and how it can be turned to our advantage.”

“Right!” Mara barked. “Now if all of you measly little mortals could shut the fuck up for a second, everything will make sense!” She kicked off the ground, floated to the top of Kodachi’s throne, and sat there, gargoyle-esque.

“So,” the demoness said, “Yeah, I was hanging around, Kodachi got stuffed in a trunk by the goddess who took your Ranma, and I got her out. What can I say? Such a pure soul she’s got.”

“Yeah, pure  _ evil _ .”

“Ukyo Kuonji, if you don’t shut your okonomiyaki hole imma shove one of those spatulas you’ve got up your cutie-patootie and twist the motherfucker until you shit blood. We good.”

Ukyo gulped. “Crystal clear.”

“Right! So, the thing Urd never tells  _ nobody _ is that she’s half demoness. Her dad’s the All-Father, her mom’s Hild, arch-demoness and ruler of Niflheim and she’s basically my boss. And Urd can try to play Wholesome Hot Mom Goddess all she wants, as long as she denies that heritage she’s gonna be just a Second Class deity instead of the heiress to Evil Itself.”

“Hild is… who?” Akane froze. “There’s someone even  _ more evil than you? _ ”

Mara fluffed her hair, grinned. “Satan’s shrunken testicles. I’m a First Class Demoness. You can’t really top that unless you  _ are _ Hild, yeah. Everyone in Japan thinks I’m the top dog just ‘cause I tried to bone some dude with funny hair a few millennia back. It’s nice to be flattered, buuuuuuut I’m gettin’ a lil’ sick of it these days, capiche? Her Ladyship doesn’t approve of you people not understanding the command structure.”

“Yes,” Kodachi said, “as do many who assume that my deluded brother is the future of the clan. He is a dinosaur in a eighteen-year-old’s body, but not even Father understands that. Ah, we have so much in common…”

“Anyhoo,” Mara continued, cracking her neck, glaring down at the assembled girls, “Hild wants her baby girl back. Fully demonic, see. I happen to think this is a splendid idea, ‘cause Urd and me - we was close as blood when we were your age. World was young, wars hadn’t really started yet…” She sighed. “We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Then Belldandy, her lil’ sister, came along, shat on a beautiful romance because  _ Belldandy _ . But good news is Bell’s back up in Heaven where she can’t just meddle in my affairs. So I’m gonna drag Urd back down to Niflheim.”

Akane glared. “You mean to capture Ranma and use him as bait, don’t you!”

Shampoo gawped. “Aiyah! Violent Girl catch on quick! Demoness want use Airen for too-too evil plan! Shampoo is have new level of respect for Violent Girl!”

“Wait!” Mara gawped. “That was my original plan, yes. But there are ways to  _ annul _ the contract between Urd and Ranma with a bit of high-level witchery. Don’t even need either of them to be in Niflheim. I made her go full demon years ago and I can probably do it again. Probably. Point is, at the point of conversion she gets a hard reset on all her binding obligations. Which would mean she’d have no theolegal grip over the boy, and you all would be free to pursue him however you wanted!”

“Really,” Kodachi added, “the plan is simple, idiot-proof. With someone like Ranma-sama involved, it has to be. We find Urd, Mara endows us with a fraction of her power, we pulverize the goddess, Mara has her way with that minx, and  _ I _ , I mean  _ we _ get Ranma-sama free from her grip!”

Akane thought. There had to be a catch. A soul-selling part. “You’re not going to brainwash us or force us into blood contracts or steal our firstborn children?”

“Eh,” Mara said. “Later. This one’s a pretty simple smash-and-grab so I don’t need the really fancy-shmancy theolegal work. And honestly? I can see your soul, tomboy. You want Ranma back. I don’t have to hypnotize you to make you go along with something like this. Because it is, as that one real estate guy from New York says - it is an incredible deal. The best. Absolutely. It’s going to be amazing.”

“You hide something,” Shampoo said. “Is never easy with demon-deal, even in old country story. In all plan, no see chance for do very evil thing except mess with Evil Goddess Girl.”

“Well,” Kodachi piped up, “We’ll have to lure Urd out, won’t we? Causing a few billion yen in property damage should be the appropriate measure,  _ and _ it falls into the generic purvey of Evil which Miss Mara so proudly represents. She’s assured me that her power boosts are of the highest quality, capable of allowing us to take on even the JSDF and walk away unscathed.”

“That’s right,” Mara said. “Just - hear me out here, kiddos. What I’ve got for you is power. Raw, sheer, unstoppable power.”

Her hand glowed with purple light.

“The kinda stuff that you’ve always wanted as warriors. As fighters in the game of love. Weapons that humanity can’t even comprehend without a bit of - let’s call it a  _ push _ . Here. Lemme show you.”

She snapped her fingers-

And Akane turned to run but felt slow, so slow, her mind thick like molasses, her limbs limp and useless as purple light pulsed through the room-

Through her-

And inside her head, she heard the demoness speak.

_ “GO GO EVIL SUPER MARA LOVE POWER MAKE UP! HA-RA-JU-KU STYLE!” _

And suddenly, Akane felt - cold. Was it always so drafty in here? No way, they were four stories underground, and holy  _ shit _ . Mara’s shit-eating grin was one of the creepiest things she’d seen all day.

“Well?” She spoke without her mouth moving, rictus grin frozen in place. Oh no. Mara was inside her head. Somehow she wanted to scream and run away but that felt - inappropriate? Wrong? She felt wrong  _ everywhere _ . “Go on, tomboy. Look down. Look at the others.”

She did.

Her hair was longer, like it had been before Ryoga. Her hands were encased in little lace gloves that felt dainty and like they could crush steel at the same time, her torso in a sort of black sequined dress, and she was wearing thigh-high socks and a big fluffy skirt and little blocky heels and and and -

“You turned us into  _ idoru _ !” Ukyo gasped.

“Nope. Try again.”

“Uh - maid cafe girls?”

“One more shot. Go on. Flex. Feel.”

Akane knew. It was so clear.

“Magical girls. Just like - like Creamy Mami and Emi.”

“Not just Magical Girls!” Mara jumped up, flipped off of Kodachi’s throne, and did a three-point landing on the conference table. “ _ EVIL _ Magical Girls!  _ SEXY EVIL  _ Magical Girls! Fuck those singing dancing little shitbirds! This is the premium shit!”

The demoness posed. No one said anything. Then Shampoo said:

“Eh. It okay.”

You could have watched Mara go through the five stages of disappointment in a millisecond. “Just okay? This is a powerup the likes of which few humans are able to handle, you’re going to be flying and shooting lasers out of your hands and throwing cars and wrecking shit in general and it’s just  _ okay _ ?”

“Oh, it shoot laser beam? Why you not say so, demoness?”

Mara threw up her hands. “I dunno! Come on, you guys, it comes with the territory! It’s a fundamental part of the appeal! This should be obvious! Magical girls!”

She looked around, got nothing but three blank stares and a winning smile from Kodachi. “I think these brutes don’t watch the sort of anime you think they watch, Mara. Femininity is not their strong suit the way it is mine.”

“Oh. Well, uh. Dang.” She hung her head in defeat. “Whatever. Look, just - hang around. I brought, uh, some food if anyone’s hungry. If my, uh, new best buddy Kodachi’s folks are as good as she says they is, we’re gonna be storming Urd’s hideout tonight.” She straightened up. “Which, now that I think about it, gives us time for me to train you in the art of the Magical Girl! We’ll fly around for a bit, cause some mayhem, get the JSDF to show, and you guys can wreck tanks and see for yourself how awesome this is.”

“Very well, then,” Kodachi said, turning off the projector. “We have our objective. Follow me to the armory and I’ll provide you with weapons you can magically enhance for that certain -  _ kick _ .”

“Uh,” Ukyo shrugged. “Aren’t magical girls not supposed to whip out antitank rifles, but defeat things with the power of love and justice?”

“Okay,” Mara said, “so you know  _ that _ phrase, at least. Okay. I can work with this. Yeah. These are technically actuated by the power of  _ lust _ and  _ hate _ , so if you just concentrate those feelings in Urd’s direction you can probably pump out a few extra terajoules of energy. With people like you that shouldn’t be too hard.”

And with that, she stormed back the way she entered, muttering to herself, “They’re so jaded. I mean, c’mon. Not even Nurse Angel Ririka? Buncha skanks…”

And the moment she was gone, Ukyo spoke.

“This has got to be the dumbest fucking evil scheme I’ve ever heard of. This shit makes Ceasar Romero’s Joker look like Hannibal Fucking Lector.” She grinned. “I think it shouldn’t be too hard to, say, outsmart this demoness and maybe punt her back to hell before  _ she _ gets designs on Ranchan. If you three are up for that, of course.”

“Hm. Spatula girl has good plan. Shampoo has better plan. Great-grandmother know of many demon-banishing secret technique from old days. Too-too easy.”

Kodachi’s eyes went wide with shock, then settled back into her usual resting bitch face. “I think perhaps you underestimate Mara’s earnestness, if not at least her power as a demoness. But if you insist on out-evilling capital-E Evil - how could the Black Rose refuse such a proposition? OH HO HO HO-”

“Hmph!” Akane hmphed. “It’ll never be that easy! We’ll need a real spiritualist’s help if we want to get out of this mess unscathed!”

“Oh?” Kodachi said. “I had never pegged you for such an old-fashioned girl, Akane. Please, elaborate.”

Akane had been thinking about this ever since she’d gotten stuck in this skirt. Even if the  _ others _ were fine with wearing skimpy thongs while  _ flying _ , flashing their crotches to hundreds of people on the streets, she sure as hell wasn’t that perverted. No, if Mara thought she was going to go along with this quietly, she had another thing coming! “There’s a shrine in Asakusa I used to go to with Mom. A miko by the name of Hino is said to be the best exorcist in all Tokyo. If we just nab an ofuda or two from her, we might have an edge!”

“You mean steal from hallowed ground?” Kodachi said. “Or you mean attempt to explain this ridiculous situation to an outsider and hope for the best?”   
Akane had an answer for that, too. “She’s said to be very unlucky in love. Almost legendary, in fact, for her fiery passions.”

“Ah, so she’s you but she has a job,” Ukyo snarked.

“Why you!” Akane was just about ready to choke a bitch. “J-Just because you think you’re so sexy in that crossdressing outfit doesn’t mean you can talk shit about me! I’m just trying to help and all you’re doing is being useless!”

“Listen here, sugar-”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Spatula Girl call Violent Girl whatever she want, yes? Is free country, so is said.”

“Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhhh…”

Mara smirked at the end of the room as she listened to the four fall to bickering. “Heh. That was almost too easy. Think you’ve got bigger game in mind, Mistress?”

Mini-hild floated above her, invisible to the mortals. “Don’t be so certain,” she purred. “You’ll still have to help these four directly if you want to incapacitate Urd. Not mano-a-mano per se, but you can’t just sit back and watch the fireworks.”

“Feh. Whatever. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this for months. I’m not gonna screw it up, Mistress. I swear to you.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt you. Once I have my daughter restored to me - well. Things are going to be very different now that she’s decided to stop drinking and start working again. What fun this next year will be!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I booped this chapter off of the internet after some intense advice from a reader about characterization. It's rewritten now so it should be - better-ish.
> 
> Also this is the Internet Thing that has gotten more views in a few days than Vigilante's Run got in 3-ish years. Wow. Thanks, everybody. I have a coherent idea for the next few chapters, too, which is pretty rare, coming from me. My rate will probably slow down to something more healthy (slower) over the next weeks as classes ramp up, but I cannot deny, I am having fun here. Too much fun, in fact.
> 
> Next time: Ranma settles into his life as a professional hero, gets his first assignment from Urd - and runs into trouble both expected and unexpected.


	6. Chapter 6: In which, ostensibly liberated from the confines of ordinary life in the Campbellian sense, the hero receives his first assignment from a completely different Goddess

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS FANFICTION WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS. RAID IS A MOBILE BATTLE RPG SET IN A FANTASY WORLD WHERE YOU ASSEMBLE A LEGION OF OVER 100+ HEROIC CHAMPIONS TO FIGHT THE BAD GUYS! AND IT'S FREE! THAT'S RIGHT ABSOLUTELY FREE-
> 
> Okay, I'll shut up now.

**EARLIER THAT DAY**

**A PENTHOUSE OF CONSIDERABLE SIZE**

Ranma woke up and immediately regretted it.

There were several reasons. One, she was currently a girl. Two, it was almost impossible to think between the marching band, the NRA rally, and the Hell’s Angels meetup occurring simultaneously in between her ears. Just possible enough for her cognitive processes to force her eyelids open. Add, then, to the band and the rally and the meetup, an unfortunate accident at Big Tim’s Fireworks Emporium ( _ The Finest, Most Patriotic Pyroclastics this side of the Rockies! _ ) and an unhinged Tibetian monk using her skull as one of those really cool-sounding gongs.

That was what Ranma felt like for the first few minutes she had as a free woman.

Three, as her eyes adjusted to the light streaming in from the skylight, she realized that  _ holy shit she was in a place that had a skylight _ . She knew of no place that she resided in regularly that had a skylight.

Fourth - and here, as her higher brain functions began to decalcify from perfect stupor, fear began to creep in - if she was in an unfamiliar place, in girl-form, and with a headache she normally would have chalked up to one of Shampoo’s big maces whacking her over the head - what exactly had happened last night?

It was morning, right? Right. Light. And she was waking up. Well. Chalk another one up to Euclidean logic. Victory over the forces of entropy was surely imminent.

Oh, and while she was on the topic, fifth - and here her brain decided now was as good a time as any to overclock her self-awareness and dial up her fear into batshit cowering terror - Who, exactly, was holding her like she was a pillow?

“Mrmrmrmrmmmmm.”

Someone who had no idea they were doing such a thing, lost as they were in the grip of blissful sleep Ranma had recently been ejected from, like an underage teenager thrown out of the local strip club after it became clear that the metaphorical teenager had only twenty bucks on him.

“Hrmrhrmhrrrrrrrrr. Iluvyoutoobelllllldaaaaaaannnnnndddddddddeeeeeeeeeee.”

She was squeezed. Pulled closer. The other woman - it had to be a woman, just had to be - smelled like - what? Old. Not Old Spice, but something that had been since forever and would be for a long time coming. Like the manuscripts in an old library.

Well, that was all fine and dandy, but Ranma had no intention of staying like this. “Hey,” she whispered. “Uh. Wake up.”

“Ohnonononononooooooo hrhrhrrrrrrr. Zhouldnt. Kent. Kant. Immanuel. Hehehehehe hewassuchaprig. Rid belll? Heheheheeeeeeeee.”

And with that, the woman flipped poor Ranma around before she could wriggle out of her grip-

And Ranma found herself looking straight at the sleeping face of her patron goddess.

She was very beautiful like this. Not sexy, just - quiet. Soft. The slight smell of time on her dark skin.

It was while Ranma was considering this that the logical part of her brain, the part that was supposed to string evidence together into sensible conclusions, suddenly had a miraculous breakthrough prompted by her remembering what happened last night.

Yep. That fuckin’ happened. He could barely remember - oh Kami.

When she said that fuckin’ happened - was that in both senses of the word? Uncertain.

Well. Only one thing to do then. Namely, scream like a little girl until her patron booted her out of bed.

And so she did just that.

* * *

**A BIT LATER**

They had not spoken for nearly an hour when Ranma, having dug through the strange apartment’s fridge, said, at long last, “Uh, Urd?”

“Whaa?”

“There’s no food in here.”

“Really.” The Norn of Then cocked her head to the side, her platinum-white hair unraveling from its messy bun with the motion. “Ah. Right. Forgot to get groceries. Gotta do that.”

“I mean there’s nothing in here, just - water. That’s really weird.”

“Sorry. Sorry. Aesir don’t eat n’ stuff. Being. You know. Beings of pure spiritual energy n’ stuff.”

“Oh. So this is-”

“Divinities usually rent places for fieldwork. Used to use shrines or temples, but not a lot of those left in convenient places. Yeah. This is - well, it’s not really  _ my _ penthouse ‘cause I’m on a budget, but the goddess who normally resides here hasn’t been on earth for a year or two, so she won’t mind.”

Ranma nodded, accepting the justification. Freeloading had been her default mode of existence for all her life. “Mm.”

“Seven-Eleven a block down the street. You can go there. I’ll scrounge up some cash for you.”

“Thanks. Wait. Why am I going to get food? Why not you?”

“Because I’m not the one eating.”

“So I’ve gotta cook my own breakfast?” Dang. This whole career change / kidnapping thing sucked. To never taste Kasumi’s cooking again was a travesty words could not adequately express

“I’m a goddess, Ranma. Not a live-in maid.” Urd sipped her espresso, brushed a few stray strands of hair out of her face. “So, you can do that?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Lemme just change back into a boy first.” She put the kettle on, waited for it to boil. “So, uh, Urd. You and I ditched the Tendos when I was a boy, right? So why am I a girl now?”

“Oh, I wanted to see if you could hold your liquor better or worse as a girl, or if your liver doesn’t really change with the curse.”

“So we-”

“I got you wasted and we watched some anime together. I think it was Trunks versus Frieza or something? All I know was that they went even further beyond Super Saiyan than previously thought possible…” She stopped. “Oh, yeah. You can’t really hold your drink as a boy  _ or _ a girl. So I know that now, going forward.”

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” The kettle was just about to boil, now. Probably time to pop the Big Question.

“Hey. Urd?”

“Yeah?”

“About last night…”

The phone rang. Urd glanced over at it. “I need to take that,” she said. “Gimme a sec.”

“And then can we talk about-”

“Yes yes yes,” Urd said as she floated over to the receiver. Picked it up, then jerked away.   
“Heyo, girlfriend! What’s up? Oh. Right. Wow, little paranoid, doncha think? Putting cameras in - whatever. Look, I’m on a job so I figured you wouldn’t mind if I just borrowed it.” She listened, made a little flapping motion with her free hand. “Seriously? I cleaned it up, though. And it’s not like it’ll hurt the resale value, will it? This fucking place has a  _ pool. _ Yes. Yes. I swam in your pool. No, I did not. Why, should I bother next time? Not like anyone can see me. You’re telling me you don’t swim in the buff in that thing?”

Ranma almost knocked the kettle over. Recovered. Tried not to think about that.

“Ha! Fat chance. I’m a patron goddess now, remember? I’ve got a hero to manage.” Urd gave the phone a face. Stuck her tongue out and blew a little raspberry. “Yep, that’s right. So you understand, don’t you? A guy like this - Yes. Yes, he is. No. No I didn’t. We’ve barely known each other for two days. Oh, you’re one to talk. Remember you and that one minor saint? Yeah, the one with his femur in some church in Budapest. You barely knew him for a week before you were gushing about how - yes. I do remember. Norn of the Then, remember? Point is you’re one to talk about being a  _ putain _ , flower girl. Yep. He is a he. Most of the time. What? Yes I mean that. Poor kid’s got a Jusenkyo curse - It’s true! No, I can’t lift it and neither can you. Yes. Not won’t. I would if I could. Look, you want to see the truth of my situation you can come down through one of those toilet cameras and look with your naked eyes, can’t you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you heard me. Come on. I’ll pound your thong-clad ass, bitch-” She stopped. Slammed the phone down. Turned to Ranma, a Kasumi-like smile on her face.

“Ranma,” Urd said, “I just want to let you know we’re going to have a visitor in a bit, so if you could just change that’d be real great.”

“Whaddaya mean by ‘a bit?’”

“Oh, she should be over right about-” There was a loud FWOOMPing sound down the hallway to the bedroom, like air being displaced. “-Now.”

Which was, of course, the instant a woman dressed in a leather harness, a black bikini, and absolutely nothing else burst from the hallway into the room, screaming.

_ “URD! YOU REPREHENSIBLE SWINE!” _

Urd whirled to face the woman as Ranma dropped to the ground - as a red rose, of all things, zipped by the spot where the Norn had been standing, embedding itself stem-first in the far wall.

Urd smirked. “Come  _ on _ , Peorth. That’s the best you can do? I bet even Keiichi could do a better rose throw.”

The scantily clad woman - Peorth? - swiveled around, then flew straight at Urd, tackling her and slamming her against the floor. Straddling the goddess’s chest, she began delivering vicious backand slaps to her face, one after another.

“Thief!  _ Chatte _ ! Socialist! Liberal! Newspaper Vendor! Demoness-”

That was as far as she god before Urd grabbed her wrist and squeezed. Peorth cried out not in pain, more annoyance, before Urd sprung to her feet and threw the other woman - a goddess, she had to be - a few meters straight upward into another skylight, where she shot out of sight-

Only to drop down faster seconds later, grabbing Urd’s ankle before she could get out of the way, whipping her around in the same way and throwing her down the hallway. There was the sound of her hitting something, hard.

Peorth smirked, dusted herself off, looked around. “Ah, the trials and tribulations of having freeloaders as coworkers-”

And then she saw Ranma. Did a double take. Pointed at her with a face contorted into something out of  _ Invasion of the Body Snatchers _ .

“ _ Tabernac! _ ” the goddess cried, her rich voice shooting up an octave to borderline  _ shrill _ . “And just what is a mortal doing in my extremely expensive penthouse  _ appartement _ ?”

“Uh- I’m Ranma Saotome. Sorry about this?” Well, it worked with Akane - oh, no. It didn’t. Nevermind.

“Ranma Saotome, eh?” Peorth cocked her bare hips to the side. “Well, then, little girl, I humbly regret to inform you that whatever monetary relationship you had with that over-tanned  _ putain _ , that you forget about it-”

“I’m a guy!” Ranma squeaked out, her braless breasts jiggling.

“With a rack like that?  _ Sacre Bleu _ ! Perhaps you may have fooled Urd while she was intoxicated, but rest assured that I, Peorth, Goddess First Class, Empress of Desire, shan’t fall for such base trickery!”

“Shan’t?” Jeez, for a goddess she sounded awfully a lot like Kodachi. Same extra formal-speech, same high-pitched voice, but the French? The way she buzzed her consonants? A full-blown French Accent? That was new.

“Look, it’s an ancient Chinese Curse! Here,” she said, hefting the kettle. “Hot water! I’ll show you-”

“Oh, spare me! As if I care! Man or woman, you are a  _ tresspasseur _ ! A  _ flaneur _ ! So if you would kindly - oh my.”

For Ranma had just changed back into a man. Peorth looked him up, looked him down, settled on looking down at a very specific angle. Oh god was he still wearing his boxers?

Peorth grinned. “Ah. Monsieur Saotome. Forgive my cruelty. Urd, you see, sometimes drives me simply Up. The. Wall.” She punctuated each word with a sashay of her hips. “You are Urd’s  _ amoureux _ , I assume? And here I thought she’d lost her, touch, the-”

She looked back at the hallway, hearing something, only for Urd to come speeding out into the living room, fist drawn, whipping forward to deck her squarely in the face. Anime-style, she blasted back, leaving a Peorth-shaped imprint where she bounced off the wall before slumping to the floor.

Urd didn’t give her a chance to recover, though, dodging a half-hearted leg sweep from the paler goddess, grabbing a glass table, and smashing it over Peorth’s head before straddling her and pummeling her with VHS tapes she telekinetically grabbed from below the nearby TV:

“There! Is! No! Thing! Sex! U! Al! With! That! Boy! And! ME!” She screamed, then stopped. “I mean, I don’t think there was, but-”

This, of course, was the exact moment Peorth chose to launch a vicious uppercut that clocked Urd and sent her flying back to flop onto the sofa. Peorth stood up, wiped her face with her wrist. Looked down at the broken tapes and gasped.

“ _Zut! Merde!_ You’ve destroyed my tapes of _Dawson’s Creek,_ _Baywatch_ , and _Beverly Hills Cop_! A collection of the finest media masterpieces of Midgard, destroyed by the wicked hands of a second-class goddess! I shall not forget this!”

An idea seemed to dawn on her, as Urd groaned, her sweater-and-pants combo torn in several crucial places that Ranma didn’t want to think about. “Ah, but how could I have forgotten? Skuld’s security system ought to be rid of you  _ immediatement! _ ”

Urd shook her head. “You let Skuld install a home security system? Girl, that’s gotta be the worst idea you’ve had since trying to seduce Keiichi.”

Peorth blushed, full-body. “Oh! You big, stupid, poopyhead! You naughty nympho! Enough of this!”

She shouted at the top of her lungs in an operatic roar: “BASTILLE DE VAUBAN! FOUR GLORIOUS DAYS! ACTIVATE - CODE OMEGA!”

Urd kicked off the couch just as Ranma glanced this way and that. Machine guns? Lasers? Gas? “Get  _ down, _ Ranma!”

Nope. For Urd was half right. Peorth’s installation of a home security system was not a bad idea. But Code Theta was one thing, and Code Omega was entirely something else.

As Urd dived over Ranma, the entire penthouse promptly went up in a small mushroom cloud.

* * *

**A FEW MOMENTS LATER**

Ranma woke up and immediately regretted - wait. Shit. He’d said that already.

He opened his eyes. It was dark. He couldn’t move. Oh Kami, was he dead? It sure felt like it. His logical brain said that yeah, he had to be after whatever the  _ fuck _ Peorth just did.

Well. If this was the afterlife, it sure was soft. Sure smelled like old manuscripts - wait. Wait.

Oh.

Urd was crouched over Ranma, clutching him as tight as she possibly could without injuring him. It wasn’t exactly the ol’ ‘girl falls on top of guy right in the boob zone’ cliche but it was surprisingly close.

Urd kicked off, rolled Ranma over. Hugged him.

“Urd-”

“Oh, All-Father preserve us! You’re, you’re okay! I thought you were dead! I-”

“URD!”

She whirled to face Peorth. Both goddesses were singed and burnt, standing in rubble on the naked top of an apartment building. Urd clutched the slightly smaller boy like she was swaddling him. “What.”

Ranma half expected the two to start fighting again, and decided he didn’t want to stick around to find out. Maybe if he used the umisenken, that old ki-cloak trick he’d learned from Ryu Kumon? Maybe if he just hid himself in a very small place the bad women would go away and he could get on with his bizarre excuse for life as a free man.

“You will, of course, help me with the repair magic here. But before I reassemble my residence, I should like to know - if you are certain that there is nothing lovey-dovey between you and the boy - what exactly is he to you?”

“Oh,” Urd said, smiling. “He’s my hero.”

* * *

**ONE LONG EXPLANATION AND LIBERAL APPLICATION OF REPAIR MAGIC LATER**

**PEORTH’S ROOFTOP HOT TUB**

Peorth hadn’t even changed out of her outfit. She literally had thrown her floaty leather harness across the rim of the room, said, “That’s all, darlings!” and hopped in.

Ranma, for his part, just sat there, submerged except for half of his head, and bubbled. Let the little jacuzzi jets batter his crotch and soaked underwear. Urd promised she’d buy him clothes later, but somehow, knowing her fashion sense, he didn’t expect he was going to get much more net cloth out of the arrangement.

He hadn’t had breakfast, he realized. Well, he also had like no appetite, so that was for the best. He was just going to watch Peorth and Urd… move.

Shampoo was curvy. Kodachi was toned and slender. Even Ukyo had her charms. But these gals - whoo. All that and more. Not that he was gonna say that. He wasn’t a pervert. But - jeez. Looking at these girls - women - goddesses - in swimsuits that were more absent then present - how could you  _ not _ ?

Urd sipped at her glass of water - Peorth wasn’t going to let her so much as  _ touch _ her secret reserve of cognac after she’d cleaned out her wine fridge with nary a ‘may I’ last night - and sighed, finishing up her story of the last two days or so. “Yeah, so then I pop the trunk and whammo, Kodachi’s gone. Mara musta been stalking me again, so she let her out, they wrote a stupid note together - ugh.”

“Hm,” Peorth nodded. “And so, you nabbed Ranma posthaste, broke into my apartment via the television with him, and treated him to jell-o shots. That’s very -  _ Urd _ of you, playing flirtatious drinking games with an innocent young man while trespassing on private property in order to wipe your memories of your troubles, all culminating in a bender you have no memory of. Your charge’s virginity, then, is trapped in a Schroedinger’s paradox, neither popped nor unmolested. Goodness gracious.”

“Pffffft,” Urd pfffffted. “Whatever. They weren’t  _ jell-o _ .”

“And that ridiculous American car is where, exactly?”

“In your second reserved parking spot. What? Come on, you weren’t using it, were you?”

“I suppose, having decided to steal my shit and drink my liquor, you also took my brand-new Mitsubishi Lancer for a fender-bending joyride, accruing license demerits the same way you pick up men?”

“Your what now? That dumb-looking car? Please. Why would I do that?”

“Oh, it matters little.” Peorth leaned back, let her leg kick up and out, brushing Ranma’s crotch with her painted toes on the way up. “Goodness. Well, I suppose I’ll find out if the Tokyo Highway Patrol pulls me over later.” She stretched out further, every part of her perfectly proportioned limbs and digits flexing and relaxing in synchronized movements before scissoring her legs together to dip them back into the hot tub.

Ranma sunk further in.

“Now, then. While it’s admirable that you are finally doing some real work after failing to do anything administrative for the past year or so, at some point I have to reprimand you for not living within your budget. So once you’ve washed up, if you could simply leave, that would be most excellent of you.”

“Nope. Sorry. Can’t do it. Ranma needs space. I need luxury. Besides, you aren’t using it, are you?”

“It’s the principle of the thing, darling. While you were busy attempting to play fairy godmother to your perfectly independent sister, wasting your talents on ever-more-elaborate potions, I was manipulating the stock market in those twilight years before the bubble finally burst. One of us was productive and the other was not.  _ Je C'est la vie _ .”

“Feh,” grunted Urd. “So what, you just sit on this thing and wait for the price to go up, until you cash out minutes before the next bubble?”

“I  _ do _ . And why shouldn’t I? Mortals do this all the time. Speculation is  _ L’fundament _ of the Midgard economy. Booms, busts - as long as you can anticipate them, sway them to your advantage, you’ll never have to be audited by those dreadful hags in Accounting again! Plus, it makes a lovely vacation home. Not that I have much time for such things these days, being forced down into the deep bowels of Admin…”

“Skuld says you barely work at all. Just sit there and gossip about my mom.”

“ _ Skuld _ ,” Peorth huffed, “thinks herself above the whims of passion, and above enjoying herself when faced with drudgery. I make no such pretensions. Really, she’s just got an awfully overactive imagination. Perhaps I said something about the All-Mother once or twice, but only that at most.”

“Sure. Sure. Y’know, for a supposed Goddess First Class, you really can get close to lying without trying very hard.”

“Yes. Well. I exaggerate, or I obscure. But lying is not in my nature. Whereas for you-” Thinking, she turned to Ranma. “Say, my boy, did you  _ know _ that Urd is half  _ demoness _ ?”

“Yeh. Think so.” Under no circumstances was Peorth going to lean forward. The universe was just. Of this much he had to have faith.

“Ah! How wonderful. She must have let it slip on accident. Well, that’s not even  _ half _ the story. Urd, perhaps-”

“No.”

“But he really should-”

“No. No he doesn’t.”

“Ah, to not know that one could end up in the employ of-”

“Nyeh. Zip it,” Urd snipped. She leaned toward Peorth. “Are you gonna keep giving me shit or are you gonna kick me out.”

The brunette goddess laughed. “I was considering that. But you know, something  _ has _ come up. And I do feel so bad for your lack of luck in love, with the Accounting harpies, with everything, really. So - I would like Ranma here, in the official capacity of an Aesir-enlisted hero, to do something for me.”

Saying this, she folded over, her bust just brushing up against her bare knees, bow-shaped lips inches away from Ranma’s forehead. Ranma thought for a moment - then scrambled out of the hot tub insect-style, as fast as his legs could carry him, before smacking into a steel lounge chair and falling on his butt.

Urd tried not to laugh. “I think that’s a pretty big no, Flower Girl. So, Rose-of-Versailles - being rejected.” She poked the goddess in the side with her pointer finger. “What’s that feel like? By a horny teenager, no less.”

Peorth sighed. “Ranma, wouldn’t you at least care to hear my proposition before you reject it out of hand? In exchange, I’ll gladly let you and Urd freeload here-”

“No! Nononononononono! Imnotapervert! Imnotforsale! Mygirlboobsarebiggeranyway! I’M NOT A PERVERT!”

He said it so loud it  _ echoed _ , ‘vertvertvertvert’. Peorth glared at Urd. Urd shrugged. “Akane,” she said. “Not my fault. The other girl.”

“Regardless,” Peorth said, standing up and climbing out of the hot tub. “I have no desire to have such an impressionable boy be convinced that all goddesses want is worship in exchange for sexual favors. In any case, a first time with a goddess would ruin every mortal relationship you’ have for the rest of your days. No, Ranma, I want to offer you a  _ quest _ .” She snapped her fingers, and a few towels jumped from one side of the pool over to her. She tossed one to Ranma, and began to dry herself off.

“A what?”

“A quest! An adventure. A journey. A challenge. A heroic deed you will perform. Surely you’ve played a video game or two where such things take place? Read Record of Lodoss War or something like that?”

“Um.” He had not. Fantasy was just - so unrealistic. Dragons, unfortunately, didn’t look like that, and weren’t that easily killed. “I get what you’re saying? Like - rescuing a princess or killin’ a dragon or retrieving some lost treasure?”

“Yes,” Peorth cooed. “And the best part is, you can do it here in Tokyo!”

“Okay.” This was sounding better and better. Marginally. Not even leaving the city. But, then again, this particular goddess struck him as unhinged in that sort of obsessive Kodachi way. Even threw roses and all that. “What’s the catch? I gotta be a girl to do it?”

“Not even that. All you have to do-” here she reached down into her cleavage, Urd-style, and yanked out a slip of paper- 

“Is win a young maiden’s heart!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that was a good chapter to write. We might be putting off the actual fight scenes for a few more chapters, but I do have a straightforward-ish story for this next - arc? I guess that's the word? Before I run out of story concepts. I wanted to get this chapter out just for the sake of the gags I've already written.
> 
> So. Uh. Who is Peorth going to hook up with Ranma? Don't know. Thought I did, but someone thought a different character from the same other franchise would be more suited. Why? Eh. So I'm ending the chapter on this cliffhanger, I'll resolve the issue later, and then hopefully Ranma will go on quest no.1. Then, hopefully, Ranma will actually have some time to shine, because I'm getting the sense in retrospect that I've overindulged letting the AMG characters dominate interactions. Urd's funny and all, but this is Ranma's story too.


End file.
